On 12/02/2012 08:18 PM, Solmaz Filiz KARABAĞ wrote:
Dear R user!
I have a small question!
I have calculated the relative importance of the variables.
However I would like to compare the relative importance of two different
groups of variables (i.e Strategy and industry)
For example let me say that strategy has 2 sub varialbes and industry has
four different variables!
Can I simply add the importance of those four industry variables importance
over each other and say that the importance level of industry is the total
of those four varibales' importance?
Can I also do the same thing and add the importance of two strategic
variables and have a strategic level importance?
After these simple calculation, can I compare the importance of those
groups?
Hi Solmaz,
There are two ways to combine related variables that are generally
accepted. The cold, hard, arms-length method is to see whether those
variables are covarying to the extent that we can legitimately infer
that an underlying variable is responsible for that covariance. Say that
your strategy measures 1) how long you spent developing that strategy
and 2) how many sources of information you consulted. These two measures
are likely to involve the underlying behavior of extensive preparation
for developing a strategy rather than just having a couple of beers and
flipping a coin. So the beer-flippers are likely to score low on both
measures and the slow swots are likely to score high and principal
components analysis or similar will get you through.
The second method is to convince people that they go together. Instead
of applying the black box of mathematic analysis, one shines the clear
light of logic upon the problem. It is apparent to anyone with the
normal quota of neurons that expended time and verified sources of
information are more likely to be applied together in developing a good
strategy and so on. If you are important or persuasuve enough, you may
get away with mere assertion. If not, you must appeal to the authority
of others, particularly those who have already demonstrated some
quantitative association between the measures.
Reality usually involves performing the first method, and if this does
not produce the desired result, trying to find support in the literature
for the result you would like. You can of course just baldly state that
you are combining the variables in a particular way beacuse you think it
makes sense and apply the empirical test of whether anyone buys your story.
Jim
______________________________________________
R-help@r-project.org mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
