Spport for categorical or binary variables

[fccoelho]

Does the Lingam Algorithm allow the inclusion of categorical and dichotomical variables?

[sshimizu2006]

Unfortunately, such an algorithm is not available now.

[xiangyu-sun-789]

Hi professor Shimizu, may I ask why LINGAM does not work with categorical or binary variables? For ICA-LIGNAM, it looks like its identifiability is based on ICA. I found a paper that says ICA works with binary data if the data is sparse. Did I misunderstand something? Thank you very much.

[sshimizu2006]

The validity of the ICA algorithm implemented in the package was theoretically proved under the assumption that the variables are continuous (and non-Gaussian). So, I replied that no such algorithm is available now (at least in the package). But, it does not mean that it does not allow any other distributions. It might be possible to prove that some algorithm using such a binary ICA works.

[xiangyu-sun-789]

Hi professor Shimizu, thank you very much for the clarification!

[tonyabracadabra]

Hi professor Shimizu, is categorical variables supported by LIM now? (or that’s binary variables only) @sshimizu2006

[sshimizu2006]

Yes, LiM allows binary variables.