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Test of Parallel Regression Assumption in R

Dear Heather,

You can make this test using the ordinal package. Here the function
clm fits cumulative link models where the ordinal logistic regression
model is a special case (using the logit link).

Let me illustrate how to test the parallel regression assumption for a
particular variable using clm in the ordinal package. I am using the
wine dataset from the same package, I fit a model with two explanatory
variables; temp and contact, and I test the parallel regression
assumption for the contact variable in a likelihood ratio test:
Loading required package: MASS
Loading required package: ucminf
Loading required package: Matrix
Loading required package: lattice
response rating temp contact bottle judge
1       36      2 cold      no      1     1
2       48      3 cold      no      2     1
3       47      3 cold     yes      3     1
4       67      4 cold     yes      4     1
5       77      4 warm      no      5     1
6       60      4 warm      no      6     1
Likelihood ratio tests of cumulative link models:

    formula:                nominal: link: threshold:
fm1 rating ~ temp + contact ~1       logit flexible
fm2 rating ~ temp           ~contact logit flexible

    no.par    AIC  logLik LR.stat df Pr(>Chisq)
fm1      6 184.98 -86.492
fm2      9 190.42 -86.209  0.5667  3      0.904

The idea is to fit the model under the null hypothesis (parallel
effects - fm1) and under the alternative hypothesis (non-parallel
effects for contact - fm2) and compare these models with anova() which
performs the LR test. From the high p-value we see that the null
cannot be rejected and there is no evidence of non-parallel slopes in
this case. For additional information, I suggest that you take a look
at the following package vignette
(http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/ordinal/vignettes/clm_tutorial.pdf)
where these kind of tests are more thoroughly described starting page
6.

I think you can also make similar tests with the VGAM package, but I
am not as well versed in that package.

Hope this helps,
Rune

Rune Haubo Bojesen Christensen
Postdoc
DTU Compute - Section for Statistics
---------------------------------------------------
Technical University of Denmark
Department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science
Richard Petersens Plads
Building 324, Room 220
2800 Lyngby
Direct +45 45253363
Mobile +45 30264554
http://www.imm.dtu.dk
On 11 March 2013 22:52, Nicole Ford <nicole.ford at me.com> wrote: