Multidimensional scaling of categorical data using the partition method

Multidimensional scaling (MDS) is an exploratory analysis of multivariate data to represent the dissimilarity among objects in the geometric low-dimensional space. However, a general MDS map only shows the information of objects without any information about variables. In this study, we used MDS based on the algorithm of Torgerson (Theory and Methods of Scaling, Wiley, 1958) to visualize some clusters of objects in categorical data. For this, we convert given data into a multiple indicator matrix. Additionally, we added the information of levels for each categorical variable on the MDS map by applying the partition method of Shin et al. (Korean Journal of Applied Statistics, 28, 1171-1180, 2015). Therefore, we can find information on the similarity among objects as well as find associations among categorical variables using the proposed MDS map.