Comparison between packages Shapes and Genstat® in ordinary procrustes analysis for sensory profiling of food productsdoi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5892/ruvrv.2012.102.128135

Resumo

In modern management of companies, the quantitative knowledge is determinant for defining marketing strategies and product images. Particularly for industries of products that strongly stimulate the human senses, the statistical methods that allow quantitative evaluations are joined under the science chunk called Sensometrics. One of those methods is the Ordinary or Classical Procrustes Analysis (OPA), that consists in finding the best way one matrix can be fitted to a reference matrix by minimizing the sum of squared distances. Since this methodology begun to be use in sensory evaluation many specific and non-specific software have been developed. The high costs involved to purchase such programs lead some researchers to look for free software. R is a free statistical and mathematical package that already has an implementation of OPA and GPA (Generalized Procrustes Analysis) in its Shapes package (a statistical shape analysis package). The aim of this paper is to interpret, describe and compare R output to a non-specific software, GenStat^®, normally used in sensory analysis. Under simulated data the software were compared and lead to same conclusions and interpretations. Therefore, package Shapes from R can be used in sensory analysis, rather than Statistical Shape analysis.