My multiway analysis: From Jan de Leeuw to TWPack and back

Abstract

This paper is a mixture of my personal experiences of Jan de Leeuw as a supervisor of my master’s and Ph.D. theses, as well as a sketch of how three-way analysis, the subject Jan chose for me, developed over time. The emphasis is on where it is and was applied, and to what extent it stole the hearts of applied researchers in different disciplines. Furthermore, the paper contains some musings about how we should go about promoting the use of the techniques, especially in the social and behavioural sciences. Finally, an overview is provided of available software and attention is paid to how (three-way) software may be designed to encourage its use by the scientific community, as it befits a paper in the Journal of Statistical Software.