Some new and easy ways to describe, compare, and evaluate products and assessors

Recently, in response to industrial demand to develop faster and cheaper methods of descriptive analysis, several methods have been offered as alternatives to conventional profiling. We present three of these methods: sorting tasks, projective mapping, and flash profiling along with a new statistical method to analyze them. This new statistical method, called DISTATIS is a generalization of classical multidimensional scaling (MDS) and takes into account individual differences. DISTATIS provides two MDS-like maps: one map for the assessors, and one (compromise) map for the products. The attributes used by the assessors can also be represented on the product map as well as the specific pattern of evaluation of each assessor. Using the same statistical method to analyze different methods of descriptive analysis will facilitate their comparison.