Multidimensional Rotation and Scaling of Configurations to Optimal Agreement

An integrated method for rotating and rescaling a set of configurations to optimal agreement in subspaces of varying dimensionalities is developed. The approach relates existing orthogonal rotation techniques as special cases within a general framework based on a partition of variation which provides convenient measures of agreement. In addition to the well-known Procrustes and inner product optimality criteria, a criterion which maximizes the “consensus” among subspaces of the configurations is suggested. Since agreement of subspaces of the configurations can be examined and compared, rotation and rescaling is extended from a data transformation technique to an analytical method.