MONOTONICALLY CONVERGENT ALGORITHM FOR FACTALS

Takane, Young, and de Leeuw proposed a procedure called FACTALS for th e analysis of variables of mixed measurement levels (numerical, ordina l, or nominal). Mooijaart pointed out that their algorithm does not ne cessarily converge, and Nevels proposed a new algorithm for the case o f nominal variables. In the present paper it is shown that Nevels' pro cedure is incorrect, and a new procedure for handling nominal variable s is proposed. In addition, a procedure for handling ordinal variables is proposed. Using these results, a monotonically convergent algorith m is constructed for FACTALS of any mixture of variables.