Question

Which method of analysis does not classify variables as dependent or independent?
a. regression analysis
b. discriminant analysis
c. analysis of variance
d. cluster analysis?

Answer 1

Cluster Analysis:

Step-by-step explanation:

• Regression analysis: It is a set of statistical processes for estimating the relationships between a dependent variable (often called the 'outcome variable') and one or more independent variables (often called 'predictors', 'covariates', or 'features').

• Discriminant analysis: Discriminant Analysis can be understood as a statistical method that analyses if the classification of data is adequate with respect to the research data. It is implemented by researchers for analyzing the data at the time when-

1. Dependent variable or criterion is categorical .
2. Independent variable or predictor is an interval.

• Analysis of variance: Analysis of variance (ANOVA) is an analysis tool used in statistics that splits an observed aggregate variability found inside a data set into two parts: systematic factors and random factors. The systematic factors have a statistical influence on the given data set, while the random factors do not. Analysts use the ANOVA test to determine the influence that independent variables have on the dependent variable in a regression study.

• Cluster analysis: Cluster analysis is a multivariate data mining technique whose goal is to groups objects (eg., products, respondents, or other entities) based on a set of user selected characteristics or attributes. It is the basic and most important step of data mining and a common technique for statistical data analysis, and it is used in many fields such as data compression, machine learning, pattern recognition, information retrieval etc.

From the above definitions, we can say that cluster analysis does no classify variables as dependent or independent.

Hence, option $(d)$ is correct.