The use of multidimensional scaling in the analysis of infrastructural potential of agricultural holdings in selected municipalities of the malopolskie province

Determining infrastructural potential of a municipality is possible by measuring a number of diagnostic features describing this potential in the municipality – the number of these variables depends mainly on the purpose of the analysis. 13 variables considered as diagnostic were used in this paper to illustrate diversification of agricultural infrastructure of farms on the municipality level. The set of these variables marks a point in the multidimensional space, which is characteristic for each investigated object but differentiating objects among themselves. The potential was estimated on the basis of synthetic measure of development which is an aggregate of diagnostic features. The computed synthetic index reduces multidimensional data to a single number and replaces the point in the multidirectional space by a point on an axis in one-dimensional space. The goal of the article is to show if the picture of a population of municipalities in their many dimensions and original shape seen through synthetic coefficient is similar to the original and whether the obtained one-dimensional distance properly reflects distances in the initial space of the studied infrastructure potential. In the presented work the information quality provided by the synthetic coefficient computed for the studied districts has been analysed using multidimensional ...