Archetypal analysis for data driven benchmarking

In this work, adopting an exploratory and graphical approach, we suggest to consider archetypal analysis as a basis for a data driven benchmarking procedure. The procedure is aimed at defining some reference performers, at understanding their features, and at comparing observed performances with them. Being archetypes some extreme points, we propose to consider them as reference performers. Then we offer a set of graphical tools in order to describe these archetypal benchmarks, and to evaluate the observed performances with respect to them.