Multi-way analysis of the geographical impact on breastfeeding and nutritional indicators of Amazonian Kichwa infants from Ecuador

Kichwa communities of Ecuador are considered one of the most important native populations that are part of the country’s cultural wealth, however, studies on their nutritional status still need to be made available. This work examines the changes in the nutritional conditions (anthropometric, biochemical, breastfeeding and dietary indicators) of Kichwa babies from Tena, Ecuador, considering the domain of spatial location (three zones of residence). In order to understand how geographical location influence breastfeeding and nutritional indicators, we apply exploratory, inferential, multivariate analysis and the new three-way multivariate statistical method MixSTATICO, which allows mixed-type data (quantitative and qualitative) structured in two different groups ( \(K\) -matrices) to be related and measured on the spatial scale. The results showed a pattern of similar characteristics between the \(K\) -matrices of the breastfeeding and nutritional indicators of Kichwa babies from zones 2 (semi-rural) and 3 (rural), with very high proximities; while zone 1 (urban) had a different behavior. The analysis of the stable part of the \(K\) -matrices found that the average co-structures determined groups of variables highly associated in a positive way, including exclusive breastfeeding and infant feeding, ferritin and vitamin D, among others. This study has shown the associations between breastfeeding, anthropometric, biochemical, food consumption indicators from Kichwa babies and their zones of residence, the semi-rural and rural zones are similar, in contrast to the urban zone. The inferential , univariate and multivariate analysis of the information did not find significant differences between the study zones ( p -value > 0.05). However, the multi-way analysis , through the three-way multivariate method for mixed data MixSTATICO found different pattern structures according to the zones of residence.