Willem J. Heiser

Willem Jan Heiser (born 19 January 1949) is a Dutch social scientist who was Professor of Psychology, Statistical Methods and Data Theory at the Leiden University between 1989 and 2014.

Biography Heiser was born on 19 January 1949 in Rotterdam. He received his PhD in 1981 from the Leiden University with a thesis entitled "Unfolding analysis of proximity data" advised by John van de Geer and Jan de Leeuw. In the year 1981-82 he performed Postdoctoral research at Bell Labs in New Jersey.

Back at the University of Leiden in 1982 he joined the Department of Data Theory, were in April 1989 he was appointed Professor of Psychology & Statistics.

Publications Heiser has authored and co-authored numerous publications 1981. Unfolding analysis of proximity data. Doctorate thesis Rijksuniversiteit Leiden. 1994. Models for Asymmetric Proximities. With Berrie Zielman. 2001. SPSS Categories 11.0 . With Jacqueline Meulman. Chicago: SPSS, 2001.

Articles, a selection: Heiser, Willem J. "Convergent computation by iterative majorization: theory and applications in multidimensional data analysis." Recent advances in descriptive multivariate analysis (1995): 157-189. Groenen, Patrick JF, and Willem J. Heiser. "The tunneling method for global optimization in multidimensional scaling." Psychometrika 61.3 (1996): 529-550. Meulman, Jacqueline J., Anita J. Van der Kooij, and Willem J. Heiser. "Principal components analysis with nonlinear optimal scaling transformations for ordinal and nominal data." Handbook of quantitative methodology for the social sciences (2004): 49-70.