Multivariate analysis is the area of statistics that deals with observations made on many variables. The main objective is to study how the variables are related to one another, and how they work in combination to distinguish between the cases on which the observations are made.
The analysis of multivariate data permeates every research discipline: biology, medicine, environmental science, sociology, economics, education, linguistics, archaeology, anthropology, psychology and behavioural science, to name a few, and has even been applied in philosophy. All natural and physical processes are essentially multivariate in nature—the challenge is to understand the process in a multivariate way, where variables are connected and their relationships understood, as opposed to a bunch of univariate processes, i.e. single variables at a time, isolated from one another.