Conditional symmetry models for three-way contingency tables

Abstract

We generalize the classical conditional or triangular symmetry model for I×I contingency tables to three-way I×I×I tables with commensurable ordinal classification variables. The construction of the new family of models is such that the desirable property that connects conditional symmetry to complete symmetry and marginal homogeneity models in two-way tables is retained in three-way tables. Furthermore, connections between our proposed models obey a coherent structure. We provide maximum likelihood estimation for the new models which is illustrated with a real data example.