[R] how to construct an index or classify the cases with the combination of categorical and continuous variables

[Ingmar Visser]

There are a number of clustering routines available in R such as kmeans and
Mclust that may be applicable. Also on Cran is my depmix package which is
meant for analyzing dependent mixtures but can also be used to do latent
class analysis on mixed indicators, ie gaussian and binary indicators as you
seem to have.
hth, ingmar


On 12/5/05 5:34 PM, "ronggui" <042045003 at fudan.edu.cn> wrote:

> I have such a dataset.
> x1 x2 x3 x4
> 1  1  0  2
> 0  1  1  10
> 1  0  1  30
> ......
> 
> x1,x2,x3 are categorical variable(the value can be 0 or 1),and x4 is a
> continuous variable.
> x1,x2,x3,x4 is the manifest(measurable) variables which reflect one
> immeasurable variable.
> If all of x1-x4 are continuous variables,I can do factor analysis to extract
> the immeasurable "variable",but some of them are categorical variable which
> violate the assumptions of factor analysis.So is there anyway to extract the
> immeasurable "variable" or construct an index based on these variable?
> 
> If NOT,then is there any way to classify the cases in to two categories? If
> all the variables are binary,I can use latent class analysis to do it,but how
> about binary variables plus countinuous variables?
> 
> It is not a R question,I just want some one help me out!
> Thank you !
>  
> 
> 2005-12-06
> 
> ------
> Deparment of Sociology
> Fudan University
> 
> My new mail addres is ronggui.huang at gmail.com
> Blog:http://sociology.yculblog.com
> 
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-- 
Ingmar Visser
Department of Psychology, University of Amsterdam
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The Netherlands
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