Scoring Methodology for Ordered Factors
Starting from a given object representing a fitted model (within a certain set of model classes) whose linear predictor includes some ordered factor(s) among the explanatory variables, a new model is constructed and fitted where each named factor is replaced by a single numeric score, suitably chosen so that the new variable produces a fit comparable with the standard methodology based on a set of polynomial contrasts. Two variants of the present approach have been developed, one in each of the next references: Azzalini (2023) <doi:10.1002/sta4.624>, (2024) <doi:10.48550/arXiv.2406.15933>.