Fechnerian Scaling in R: The Package fechner

Abstract

Fechnerian scaling is a procedure for constructing a metric on a set of objects (e.g., colors, symbols, X-ray films, or even statistical models) to represent dissimilarities among the objects "from the point of view" of a system (e.g., person, technical device, or even computational algorithm) "perceiving" these objects. This metric, called Fechnerian, is computed from a data matrix of pairwise discrimination probabilities or any other pairwise measure which can be interpreted as the degree with which two objects within the set are discriminated from each other. This paper presents the package fechner for performing Fechnerian scaling of object sets in R. We describe the functions of the package. Fechnerian scaling then is demonstrated on real and artificial data sets accompanying the package.