Qualireg, A Qualitative Regression Method.

Circumstances can produce themselves under which no cardinal data are available (see Ancot and Paelinck, 1990). To allow drawing inferences about at least the direction of influence of certain potentially explanatory variables, only available as ordinal data (˵rankings″), methods should be developed to treat that problem. The method described here–QUALIREG–resulted from work on a qualitative multi-criteria method–QUALIFLEX, originated by Paelinck (1976)–which is detailed first, after which the logic of QUALIREG will be introduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]