The death of Professor K. C. Sreedharan Pillai on June 5, 1985 was a heavy loss to many statisticians all around the world. This volume is dedicated to his memory in recog­ nition of his many contributions in multivariate statis­ tical analysis. It brings together eminent statisticians Working in multivariate analysis from around the world. The research and expository papers cover a cross-section of recent developments in the field. This volume is especially useful to researchers and to those who want to keep abreast of the latest directions in multivariate statistical analysis. I am grateful to the authors from so many different countries and research institutions who contributed to this volume. I wish to express my appreciation to all those who have reviewed the papers. The list of people include Professors T. C. Chang, So-Hsiang Chou, Dipak K. Dey, Peter Hall, Yu-Sheng Hsu, J. D. Knoke, W. J. Krzanowski, Edsel Pena, Bimal K. Sinha, Dennis L. Young, Drs. K. Krishnamoorthy, D. K. Nagar, and Messrs. Alphonse Amey, Chi-Chin Chao and Samuel Ofori-Nyarko. I wish to thank Professors Shanti S. Gupta and James 0. Berger for their keen interest and encouragement. Thanks are also due to Cynthia Patterson for her help and Reidel Publishing Com~any for their cooperation in bringing this volume out.

In the last few decades the accumulation of large amounts of in­ formation in numerous applications. has stimtllated an increased in­ terest in multivariate analysis. Computer technologies allow one to use multi-dimensional and multi-parametric models successfully. At the same time, an interest arose in statistical analysis with a de­ ficiency of sample data. Nevertheless, it is difficult to describe the recent state of affairs in applied multivariate methods as satisfactory. Unimprovable (dominating) statistical procedures are still unknown except for a few specific cases. The simplest problem of estimat­ ing the mean vector with minimum quadratic risk is unsolved, even for normal distributions. Commonly used standard linear multivari­ ate procedures based on the inversion of sample covariance matrices can lead to unstable results or provide no solution in dependence of data. Programs included in standard statistical packages cannot process 'multi-collinear data' and there are no theoretical recommen­ dations except to ignore a part of the data. The probability of data degeneration increases with the dimension n, and for n > N, where N is the sample size, the sample covariance matrix has no inverse. Thus nearly all conventional linear methods of multivariate statis­ tics prove to be unreliable or even not applicable to high-dimensional data.

Most of the observable phenomena in the empirical sciences are of multivariate nature. This book presents the tools and concepts of multivariate data analysis with a strong focus on applications. The text is devided into three parts. The first part is devoted to graphical techniques describing the distributions of the involved variables. The second part deals with multivariate random variables and presents from a theoretical point of view distributions, estimators and tests for various practical situations. The last part covers multivariate techniques and introduces the reader into the wide basket of tools for multivariate data analysis. The text presents a wide range of examples and 228 exercises.