Some Exact Tests for Manifest Properties of Latent Trait Models

Jan G. Gooijer and Ao Yuan
Additional contact information
Ao Yuan: Howard University, Washington DC, USA

No 10-044/4, Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers from Tinbergen Institute

Abstract: Item response theory is one of the modern test theories with applications in educational and psychological testing. Recent developments made it possible to characterize some desired properties in terms of a collection of manifest ones, so that hypothesis tests on these traits can, in principle, be performed. But the existing test methodology is based on asymptotic approximation, which is impractical in most applications since the required sample sizes are often unrealistically huge. To overcome this problem, a class of tests is proposed for making exact statistical inference about four manifest properties: covariances given the sum are non-positive (CSN), manifest monotonicity (MM), conditional association (CA), and vanishing conditional dependence (VCD). One major advantage is that these exact tests do not require large sample sizes. As a result, tests for CSN and MM can be routinely performed in empirical studies. For testing CA and VCD, the exact methods are still impractical in most applications, due to the unusually large number of parameters to be tested. However, exact methods are still derived for them as an exploration toward practicality. Some numerical examples with applications of the exact tests for CSN and MM are provided.

Keywords: Conditional distribution; Exact test; Monte Carlo; Markov chain Monte Carlo (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C12 C15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-04-26
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://papers.tinbergen.nl/10044.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Some exact tests for manifest properties of latent trait models (2011)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tin:wpaper:20100044

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers from Tinbergen Institute Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tinbergen Office +31 (0)10-4088900 ().