Notes on the Goodness-of-Fit Tests for the Ordinal Response Model

Abstract

In this paper we discuss some cautionary notes in using the Pearson chi-squared test statistic for the goodness-of-fit of the ordinal response model. If a model includes continuous type explanatory variables, the resulting table from the fit of a model is not a regular one in the sense that the cell boundaries are not fixed but randomly determined by some other criteria. The chi-squared statistic from this kind of table does not have a limiting chi-square distribution in general and we need to be very cautious of the use of a chi-squared type goodness-of-fit test. We also study the limiting distribution of the chi-squared type statistic for testing the goodness-of-fit of cumulative logit models with ordinal responses. The regularity conditions necessary to the limiting distribution will be reformulated in the framework of the cumulative logit model by modifying those of Moore and Spruill (1975). Due to the complex limiting distribution, a parametric bootstrap testing procedure is a good alternative and we explained the suggested method through a practical example of an ordinal response dataset.