• Communications for Statistical Applications and Methods
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.559-569
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• 2012

Compositional data consist of compositions that are non-negative vectors of proportions with the unit-sum constraint. In disciplines such as petrology and archaeometry, it is fundamental to statistically analyze this type of data. Aitchison (1983) introduced a log-contrast principal component analysis that involves logratio transformed data, as a dimension-reduction technique to understand and interpret the structure of compositional data. However, the analysis is not usable when zero values are present in the data. In this paper, we introduce 4 possible methods to reduce the dimension of compositional data with zero values. Two real data sets are analyzed using the methods and the obtained results are compared.