Abstract
The analysis and interpretation of compositional data, such as major oxide compositions of rocks, has been traditionally plagued by the so-called constant-sum or closure problem. Particular difficulties have been the lack of a satisfactory, interpretable covariance structure and of rich, tractable, parametric classes of distributions on the simplex sample space. Consideration of logistic and logratio transformations between the simplex and Euclidan space has allowed the introduction of new concepts of covariance structure and of classes of logistic-normal distributions which have now opened up a substantial and meaningful array of statistical methodology for compositional data. From the motivation of a wide variety of practical geological problems we examine the range of possibilities with this new approach to the constant-sum problem.
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Aitchison, J. The statistical analysis of geochemical compositions. Mathematical Geology 16, 531–564 (1984). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01029316
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01029316