Phi-Divergence test statistics applied to latent class models for binary data

Abstract

In this paper we present two new families of test statistics for studying the problem of goodness-of-fit of some data to a latent class model for dichotomous questions based on phi-divergence measures. We also treat the problem of selecting the best model out of a sequence of nested latent class models. In both problems, we study the asymptotic distribution of the corresponding test statistics, showing that they share the same behavior as the corresponding maximum likelihood test statistic.