Measuring Interactions in Categorical Datasets Using Multivariate Symmetrical Uncertainty

Interaction between variables is often found in statistical models, and it is usually expressed in the model as an additional term when the variables are numeric. However, when the variables are categorical (also known as nominal or qualitative) or mixed numerical-categorical, defining, detecting, and measuring interactions is not a simple task. In this work, based on an entropy-based correlation measure for n nominal variables (named as Multivariate Symmetrical Uncertainty (MSU)), we propose a formal and broader definition for the interaction of the variables. Two series of experiments are presented. In the first series, we observe that datasets where some record types or combinations of categories are absent, forming patterns of records, which often display interactions among their attributes. In the second series, the interaction/non-interaction behavior of a regression model (entirely built on continuous variables) gets successfully replicated under a discretized version of the dataset. It is shown that there is an interaction-wise correspondence between the continuous and the discretized versions of the dataset. Hence, we demonstrate that the proposed definition of interaction enabled by the MSU is a valuable tool for detecting and measuring interactions within linear and non-linear models.