Henning Laeuter

Statistical Model for Categorical Data: Multidimensional Scaling Method for Categorical Data Henning Laeuter

Often data sets contain categorical data, e.g., levels of factors or names. There does not exist any ordering or any distance between these categories. At each level there are measured some metric or categorical values. We introduce a new method of scaling based on statistical decisions. For this we define empirical probabilities for the original observations and find a class of distributions in a metric space where these empirical probabilities can be found as approximations for equivalently defined probabilities.