Fitting and Testing Carroll’s Weighted Unfolding Model for Preferences

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Abstract
A quadratic programming algorithm is presented for fitting Carroll’s weighted unfolding model for preferences to known multidimensional scale values. The algorithm can be applied directly to pairwise preferences; it permits nonnegativity constraints on subject weights; and it provides a means of testing various preference model hypotheses. While basically metric, it can be combined with Kruskal’s monotone regression to fit ordinal data. Monte Carlo results show that (a) adequacy of “true” preference recovery depends on the number of data points and the amount of error, and (b) the proportion of data variance accounted for by the model sometimes only approximately reflects “true” recovery.