SINFA!

Correspondence analysis is a descriptive/exploratory technique designed to analyze simple two-way and multi-way tables containing some measure of correspondence between the rows and columns. The results provide information which is similar in nature to those produced by Factor Analysis techniques, and they allow you to explore the structure of categorical variables included in the table. The most common kind of table of this type is the two-way frequency crosstabulation table (see, for example, Basic Statistics or Log-Linear).

In a typical correspondence analysis, a crosstabulation table of frequencies is first standardized, so that the relative frequencies across all cells sum to 1. One way to state the goal of a typical analysis is to represent the entries in the table of relative frequencies in terms of the distances between individual rows and/or columns in a low-dimensional space. There are several parallels in interpretation between correspondence analysis and Factor Analysis, and some similar concepts are pointed in the methodologies section.