Internal preference mapping

Internal preference mapping is part of:

  • MX Market research and sensory analysis software

  • System configuration

    • Windows:
      • Versions: 9x/Me/NT/2000/XP/Vista/Win 7
      • Excel: 97 and later
      • Processor: 32 or 64 bits
      • Hard disk: 150 Mb
    • Mac OS X:
      • OS: OS X
      • Excel: X, 2004 and 2011
      • Hard disk: 150Mb.

Benefits

  • Easy and user-friendly
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  • Data and results shared seamlessly
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    Modular XLSTAT is a modular product. XLSTAT-Pro is a core statistical module of XLSTAT which includes all the mainstream functionalities in statistics and multivariate analysis. More advanced features contained in add-on modules can be added for specific applications. This way you can adapt the software to your needs making the software more cost-efficient.
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  • Accessible - Available in many languages
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  • Automatable and customizable
    Automatable and customizable Most of the statistical functions available in XLSTAT can be called directly from the Visual Basic window of Microsoft Excel. They can be modified and integrated to more code to fit to the specificity of your domain. Adding tables and plots as well as modifying existing outputs becomes easy. Furthermore, XLSTAT includes some special tools on the dialog boxes to generate automatically the VBA code in order to reproduce your analysis using the VBA editor or to simply load pre-set settings. This effortless automation of routine analysis will be a huge time saver on your part.

What is preference mapping?

Preference Mapping allows to build maps which show the preference of consumer for a type of product. A preference map is a decision support tool in analyses where a configuration of objects has been obtained from a first analysis (PCA, MCA, MDS), and where a table with complementary data describing the objects is available (attributes or preference data).

There are two different preference mapping methods:

  1. The one presented here - internal preference mapping
  2. PREFMAP or external preference mapping

Principle of internal preference mapping

Internal Preference Mapping (IPM) is based on Principle Component Analysis (PCA) to allow identifying which products correspond to groups of consumers.

The data used in an internal preference mapping analysis is a table of judges or customers grading products. The general representation of the internal preference map is the projection of the products in the space defined by the judges. The more judges around a product, the more popular that particular product is.

While PCA does not filter out variables, this internal preference mapping tool allows removing (after the PCA step) from the plots the judges that are not well enough displayed on a given 2 dimensional map. The measure of how well a point is projected from a d-dimensional space to a 2-dimensional map is named communality. It can also be understood as the sum of the squared cosines between the vector and the axes of the sub-space. The biplot that is then produced is not a true biplot as all the retained judges are moved on a virtual circle surrounding the product points in order to facilitate the visual interpretation.

Screenshots