Abstract
Five different methods for obtaining a rational initial estimate of the stimulus space in the INDSCAL model were compared using the SINDSCAL program for fitting INDSCAL. The effect of the number of stimuli, the number of subjects, the dimensionality, and the amount of error on the quality and efficiency of the final SINDSCAL solution were investigated in a Monte Carlo study. We found that the quality of the final solution was not affected by the choice of the initialization method, suggesting that SINDSCAL finds a global optimum regardless of the initialization method used. The most efficient procedures were the methods proposed by by de Leeuw and Pruzansky (1978) and by Flury and Gautschi (1986) for the simultaneous diagonalization of several positive definite symmetric matrices, and a method based on linearly constraining the stimulus space using the CANDELINC approach developed by Carroll, Pruzansky, and Kruskal (1980).
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Geert De Soete is supported as “Bevoegdverklaard Navorser” of the Belgian “Nationaal Fonds voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek.” The authors gratefully acknowledge the helpful comments and suggestions of the reviewers.
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Carroll, J.D., De Soete, G. & Pruzansky, S. An evaluation of five algorithms for generating an initial configuration for SINDSCAL. Journal of Classification 6, 105–119 (1989). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01908591
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01908591