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Avoiding Degeneracies in Ordinal Unfolding Using Kemeny-Equivalent Dissimilarities for Two-Way Two-Mode Preference
Antonio D'Ambrosio1, J Fernando Vera2, Willem J Heiser3
1Department of Economics and Statistics, University of Naples Federico II.
Abstract:
In this paper a simple but effective procedure to avoid degeneracies in ordinal Unfolding for preference rank data based on the Kemeny distance is proposed. Considering Unfolding as a particular MDS procedure with missing within-set proximities, unknown proximities are first estimated using correlations related to the Kemeny distance, and then the complete proximity matrix is analyzed in a standard MDS framework. A simulation study shows that our proposal is able to both recover the order of the preferences and reproduce the position of both rankings and objects in a geometrical space. Several applications on real data sets show that our procedure returns non-degenerate Unfolding solutions.
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