1. A computer-implemented method comprising: receiving a set of predictor categories and response categories associated with the predictor categories; wherein the predictor categories and the response categories represent non-metric categories; forming a set of distance vectors by: converting the non-metric response categories to a vector of metric values, and transforming the vector of metric values to a distance vector; clustering the set of distance vectors using a nonhierarchical distance-based clustering algorithm; and storing the clustered set of distance vectors in a computer-readable medium.