This paper considers a nite set of discrete distributions all having the same nite support. The problem of interest is to assess the strength of evidence produced by sampled data for a hypothesis of a speciied stochastic ordering among the underlying distributions and to estimate these distributions subject to the ordering. We present a Bayesian approach alternative to the use of the posterior ...

Linear latent structure analysis is a new approach for investigation of population heterogeneity using high-dimensional categorical data. In this approach, the population is represented by a distribution of latent vectors, which play the role of heterogeneity variables, and individual characteristics are represented by the expectation of this vector conditional on individual response patterns. ...

A fundamental question facing clinical scientists is whether the constructs they are studying are categorical or dimensional in nature. The taxometric method was developed expressly to answer this question and is being used by a growing number of investigators to inform theory, research, and practice in psychopathology. The current paper provides a practical introduction to the method, updating...

Module systems embed elements of methodologies, formalisms and tools for programming-in-the-large into programming languages. In our thesis we design a module system, its categorical model and a constructive semantics of the system in the model. The categorical model is simple and general, built using elementary categorical notions, admitting many variants and extensions of the module system. O...

BACKGROUND Graphical techniques can provide visually compelling insights into complex data patterns. In this paper we present a type of lasagne plot showing changes in categorical variables for participants measured at regular intervals over time and propose statistical models to estimate distributions of marginal and transitional probabilities. METHODS The plot uses stacked bars to show the ...

Some survey questions provide respondents with a list of possible answers and instructions to "mark all that apply." This paper presents methods for determining when the responses to a mark-allthatapply question are associated with the responses to a standard question whose answers fall in one of several mutually exclusive categories. Such data originate from many sources including large-scale ...

The conjunctive causal power PC theory (Novick & Cheng, 2004) proposes that when people have to make a judgement about whether or not two causal candidates acting together produce an effect, they take into account several hypotheses. These hypotheses state that the effect will occur due to the: a) influence of a candidate A; b) influence of a candidate B; c) conjunctive influence of both A and ...

Defuzzification is one of the fundamental steps in the development of fuzzy knowledge based systems. Given a fuzzy set μ over the reference set X, defuzzification applied to μ returns an element of X. While a large number of methods exists for the case of X being a numerical scale, only few methods are applicable when X corresponds to a categorical scale. Aggregation procedures have been extens...