This proposal deals with the development of statistical methodology for the study of compositional vectors subject to the important constraint that the components, representing proportions of some whole, must sum to unity. Professor Aitchison will continue his development of transformation techniques for the solution of a number of new practical problems peculiar to compositional data, such as estimation from amalgamated compositions, joints variability of major-oxide and trace-element compositions, the mixing of compositions and the relationship of multivariate count and compositional distributions. In conjuction with the methodological development improved software for compositional data analysis will be produced.
