Many new things at http://www.cuddyvalley.org/psychoR/ The scalassoc package, which fits exponential distance association models to indicator matrices, it now at version 1.0.0. It seems to be robust and can analyze large examples easily. It is a major improvement (in speed and robustness) over the distassoc package, which is at the same site. scalassoc does something neat (if you like that sort of thing). It writes the changing configurations to a plotwindow for your default device, showing the iterations as a movie. But, if you have ffmpeg installed in your path, then it also has the option to write the iterations to a quicktime movie file. Currently this creates a lot of intermediate jpeg's (although it cleans up after itself). It may be possible to use ffmpeg to stream them directly into a movie file. Just to give you an idea, the data are in the n x k_j indicator matrices G_j, where g_{ijl}=1 if object i is in category (level) l of variable j. The log- likelihood we maximize is -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: pastedGraphic.pdf Type: application/pdf Size: 29990 bytes Desc: not available Url : https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/attachments/20060418/6b1b37c4/attachment-0003.pdf -------------- next part -------------- Variable j has k_j levels, and after we are done we can make a Voronoi diagram (using the deldir package) of the k_j points y_{jl}. Maximizing the likelihood means trying to make sure each of the x_i is in the "correct" Voronoi cell, i.e. the Voronoi cell corresponding with the category of variable j that i was in (i.e. for which g_{ijl}=1). This generalizes multidimensional IRT models, the choice models used for voting data in political science, the Goodman-Haberman-Gilula-Ritov distance association models, the Luce-Shepard choice model, and so on, to multivariate/multicategory data. It is part of the "Gifi Goes Logistic" project. The algorithm is based on majorization, starting with multiple correspondence analysis, and each iteration does one step of a truncated SVD (with a different target in each iteration). The movies show the movement of X from one iteration to the next. ==Jan de Leeuw; Distinguished Professor and Chair, UCLA Department of Statistics; Editor: Journal of Multivariate Analysis, Journal of Statistical Software US mail: 8125 Math Sciences Bldg, Box 951554, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1554 phone (310)-825-9550; fax (310)-206-5658; email: deleeuw at stat.ucla.edu .mac: jdeleeuw ++++++ aim: deleeuwjan ++++++ skype: j_deleeuw homepages: http://gifi.stat.ucla.edu ++++++ http://www.cuddyvalley.org ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------- No matter where you go, there you are. --- Buckaroo Banzai http://gifi.stat.ucla.edu/sounds/nomatter.au ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -------------------------