A Boundary Mixture Approach to Violations of Conditional Independence

Abstract

Conditional independence is a fundamental principle in latent variable modeling and item response theory. Violations of this principle, commonly known as local item dependencies, are put in a test information perspective, and sharp bounds on these violations are defined. A modeling approach is proposed that makes use of a mixture representation of these boundaries to account for the local dependence problem by finding a balance between independence on the one side and absolute dependence on the other side. In contrast to alternative approaches, the nature of the proposed boundary mixture model does not necessitate a change in formulation of the typical item characteristic curves used in item response theory. This has attractive interpretational advantages and may be useful for general test construction purposes.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 28 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.