Scatter plotting in multivariate data analysis

In data analysis, many situations arise where plotting and visualization are helpful or an absolute requirement for understanding. There are many techniques of plotting data/parameters/residuals. These have to be understood and visualization has to be made clearly and interpreted correctly. In this paper the classical favourites in chemometrics, scatter plots, are looked into more deeply and some criticism based on recent literature references is formulated for situations of principal component analysis, PARAFAC three‐way analysis and regression by partial least squares. Biplots are also afforded some attention. Examples from near‐infrared spectroscopy are given as illustrations.