Visually Enforced

a blog by Gaston Sanchez


A book for a PLS Saga

Posted on March 31, 2015

In September of last year I started to prepare some teaching material about Partial Least Squares methods. And of course I also thought about including a couple of sections about the history and evolution of such techniques.

This wasn’t the first time I was writing about the story behind PLS. I had previously written a chapter on this subject for my PhD Dissertation, and I had also included an appendix in my book PLS Path Modeling with R. However, this time I wanted to write something a little bit different. I knew I didn’t want to list again the same material I had published before. But I wasn’t quite sure about what to do this time.

Fortunately, it didn’t take me long to come up with some ideas. At the end, I decided to write the content in a narrative style (i.e. my weird attempt to imitate a historic novel writing format). And so I pushed myself to be the narrator of the long series of events that have shaped the path traveled by PLS methods.

What I didn’t have in mind was to come up with a separate publication for the historical content. My original plan—until very recently—was to put that content next to the technical stuff (theory, equations, algebra, examples, case studies, etc).

About three weeks ago I had one of those Eureka moments of inspiration. I guess some synapsis fired in my neurons that made me change plans. “What if I split the historical content and put it in a separate manuscript?” On the one hand, that part of the material was almost finished. On the other hand, I could experiment with creating a book entirely readable online (which is something I had been wanting to do for a long time).

I can’t say much right now, but I can definitely tell you that I’m very excited for this new project. Coming really soon … a saga of PLS.


Published in categories opinion  Tagged with pls