Statistical Models - Model Comparison

Model Comparison

Models can be compared to each other. This can either be done when you have done an exploratory data analysis or a confirmatory data analysis. In an exploratory analysis, you formulate all models you can think of, and see which describes your data best. In a confirmatory analysis you test which of your models you have described before the data was collected fits the data best, or test if your only model fits the data. In linear regression analysis you can compare the amount of variance explained by the independent variables, R2, across the different models. In general, you can compare models that are nested by using a Likelihood-ratio test. Nested models are models that can be obtained by restricting a parameter in a more complex model to be zero.

Read more about this topic:  Statistical Models

Famous quotes containing the words model and/or comparison:

    ... if we look around us in social life and note down who are the faithful wives, the most patient and careful mothers, the most exemplary housekeepers, the model sisters, the wisest philanthropists, and the women of the most social influence, we will have to admit that most frequently they are women of cultivated minds, without which even warm hearts and good intentions are but partial influences.
    Mrs. H. O. Ward (1824–1899)

    The comparison between Coleridge and Johnson is obvious in so far as each held sway chiefly by the power of his tongue. The difference between their methods is so marked that it is tempting, but also unnecessary, to judge one to be inferior to the other. Johnson was robust, combative, and concrete; Coleridge was the opposite. The contrast was perhaps in his mind when he said of Johnson: “his bow-wow manner must have had a good deal to do with the effect produced.”
    Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)