Simulating Ordinal Data

Abstract

The increasing use of ordinal variables in different fields has led to the introduction of new statistical methods for their analysis. The performance of these methods needs to be investigated under a number of experimental conditions. Procedures to simulate from ordinal variables are then required. In this article, we deal with simulation from multivariate ordinal random variables. We propose a new procedure for generating samples from ordinal random variables with a prespecified correlation matrix and marginal distributions. Its features are examined and compared with those of its main competitors. A software implementation in R is also provided along with examples of its application.