An Inductive Approach to Quantitative Methodology—Application of Novel Penalising Models in a Case Study of Target Debt Level in Swedish Listed Companies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper proposes a method for conducting quantitative inductive research on survey data when the variable of interest follows an ordinal distribution. A methodology based on novel and traditional penalising models is described. The main aim of this study is to pedagogically present the method utilising the new penalising methods in a new application. A case was employed to outline the methodology. The case aims to select explanatory variables correlated with the target debt level in Swedish listed companies. The survey respondents were matched with accounting information from the companies’ annual reports. However, missing data were present: to fully utilise penalising models, we employed classification and regression tree (CART)-based imputations by multiple imputations chained equations (MICEs) to address this problem. The imputed data were subjected to six penalising models: grouped multinomial lasso, ungrouped multinomial lasso, parallel element linked multinomial-ordinal (ELMO), semi-parallel ELMO, nonparallel ELMO, and cumulative generalised monotone incremental forward stagewise (GMIFS). While the older models yielded several explanatory variables for the hypothesis formation process, the new models (ELMO and GMIFS) identified only one quick asset ratio. Subsequent testing revealed that this variable was the only statistically significant variable that affected the target debt level.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".