Partial Identification of Latent Correlations with Ordinal Data

Abstract

The polychoric correlation is a popular measure of association for ordinal data. It estimates a latent correlation, i.e., the correlation of a latent vector. This vector is assumed to be bivariate normal, an assumption that cannot always be justified. When bivariate normality does not hold, the polychoric correlation will not necessarily approximate the true latent correlation, even when the observed variables have many categories. We calculate the sets of possible values of the latent correlation when latent bivariate normality is not necessarily true, but at least the latent marginals are known. The resulting sets are called partial identification sets, and are shown to shrink to the true latent correlation as the number of categories increase. Moreover, we investigate partial identification under the additional assumption that the latent copula is symmetric, and calculate the partial identification set when one variable is ordinal and another is continuous. We show that little can be said about latent correlations, unless we have impractically many categories or we know a great deal about the distribution of the latent vector. An open-source R package is available for applying our results.