From Spider-Man to Hero - Archetypal Analysis in R

Archetypal analysis has the aim to represent observations in a multivariate data setas convex combinations of extremal points. This approach was introduced by Cutler andBreiman (1994); they dened the concrete problem, laid out the theoretical foundationsand presented an algorithm written in Fortran. In this paper we present the R packagearchetypes which is available on the Comprehensive R Archive Network. The packageprovides an implementation of the archetypal analysis algorithm within R and dierentexploratory tools to analyze the algorithm during its execution and its nal result. Theapplication of the package is demonstrated on two examples.