Journal of Data Science

Compositional data are positive multivariate data, constrained to lie within the simplex space. Regression analysis of such data has been studied and many regression models have been proposed, but most of them not allowing for zero values. Secondly, the case of compositional data being in the predictor variables side has gained little research interest. Surprisingly enough, the case of both the response and predictor variables being compositional data has not been widely studied. This paper suggests a solution for this last problem. Principal components regression using the 𝛼 -transformation and Kulback-Leibler divergence are the key elements of the proposed approach. An advantage of this approach is that zero values are allowed, in both the response and the predictor variables side. Simulation studies and examples with real data illustrate the performance of our algorithm.