Simulating correlated ordinal and discrete variables with assigned marginal distributions

Due to the increasing use of ordinal variables in different fields, new statistical methods for their analysis have been introduced, whose performances need to be investigated under different experimental conditions. Proper procedures to simulate from ordinal variables are then requested. The present paper deals with the simulation from multivariate ordinal random variables. A new proposal for generating samples from ordinal random variables with pre-specified correlation matrix and marginal distributions is presented. Its features are examined and a comparison to its main competitors is discussed. A software implementation by the R package is provided. Examples of application are also supplied.