Statisticians develop efficient method for comparing multi-group, high-dimensional data

MANOVA (multivariate analysis of variance) is a commonly used statistical method in data analysis to determine if there is any difference in the means of different groups of data. However, the classical approach is not suitable for analysing high-dimensional data. High-dimensional data often make the traditional MANOVA methods invalid since in a traditional MANOVA, the dimension is assumed to be fixed and has to be much smaller than the number of observations. In a high-dimensional MANOVA setting, this is no longer true. Prof ZHANG Jin-Ting from the Department of Statistics and Applied Probability, NUS and his Ph.D. students have developed a new high-dimensional MANOVA method which can be used to compare the means of several data groups involving high-dimensional data efficiently.