A Critique of Partial Least Squares, and a Preliminary Assessement of an Alternative Estimation Method
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Partial least squares (PLS) is sometimes used as an alternative to covariance-based structural equation modeling (SEM). This paper briefly reviews currently available SEM techniques, and provides a critique of the perceived advantages of PLS over covariance-based SEM as commonly cited by PLS users. Specific attention is drawn to the primary disadvantage of PLS, namely the lack of consistency of its parameter estimates. The instrumental variables (IV) /two stage least squares (2SLS) method of estimation is then described and presented as a potential alternative to PLS that might yield its perceived advantages without succumbing to its primary disadvantage. Preliminary simulation results show that: PLS parameter estimates exhibit substantial bias when the number of items is moderate; SEM-based methods yield lower bias; and IV/2SLS estimates may indeed provide a viable ordinary least squares (OLS)-based alternative to PLS.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".