Assessing similarity of rating distributions by Kullback-Leibler divergence

Abstract

A mixture model for ordinal data modelling (denoted CUB) has been recently proposed in literature. Specifically, ordinal data are represented by means of a discrete random variable which is a mixture of a Uniform and shifted Binomial random variables. This article proposes a testing procedure based on the Kullback-Leibler divergence in order to compare CUB models and detect similarities in the structure of judgements that raters express on set of items. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011.