A joint model of correlated ordinal and continuous variables

Abstract

In this paper we build a joint model which can accommodate for binary, ordinal and continuous responses, by assuming that the errors of the continuous variables and the errors underlying the ordinal and binary outcomes follow a multivariate normal distribution. We employ composite likelihood methods to estimate the model parameters and use composite likelihood inference for model comparison and uncertainty quantification. The complimentary R package mvordnorm implements estimation of this model using composite likelihood methods and is available for download from Github. We present two use-cases in the area of risk management to illustrate our approach.