Correspondence analysis

Correspondence Analysis (CA) is a way of looking at relationships between different variables to help us understand what's going on. It helps us by visualizing how one variable affects the other.

Imagine you want to find out how different people are eating their dinner. You give everyone a survey that has questions like ‘what did you eat for dinner?’ and ‘who else was eating dinner with you?’. This survey is your data.

Correspondence Analysis will look at your data and show the relationships between different people and the kind of food that they eat. It will create a chart that shows how often different people ate different kinds of food. For example, if one person ate only vegetables, the chart would show that they rarely ate anything else. The chart would also show if there were any patterns in the food that people ate when they were with different people (like only eating pizza when with their family).

This kind of analysis is useful because it can reveal things that the raw data wouldn't show you. It can show you if different habits or behaviors are associated with different people or situations, and can help you learn more about how people make decisions.