[…] There are several statistical methods that can identify whiskies that have a similar set of flavor characteristics, including classical techniques such as cluster analysis and factor analysis. In this article, I will use classical principal component analysis (PCA) to analyze the flavor profiles of 86 Scotch whiskies. I will show which flavor characteristics are important for differentiating whiskies. A future article compares the PCA to a non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) of the same data. …