  We propose a new approach to analyze data that naturally lie on manifolds. We
focus on a special class of manifolds, called direct product manifolds, whose
intrinsic dimension could be very high. Our method finds a low-dimensional
representation of the manifold that can be used to find and visualize the
principal modes of variation of the data, as Principal Component Analysis (PCA)
does in linear spaces. The proposed method improves upon earlier manifold
extensions of PCA by more concisely capturing important nonlinear modes. For
the special case of data on a sphere, variation following nongeodesic arcs is
captured in a single mode, compared to the two modes needed by previous
methods. Several computational and statistical challenges are resolved. The
development on spheres forms the basis of principal arc analysis on more
complicated manifolds. The benefits of the method are illustrated by a data
example using medial representations in image analysis.
