Paul R. Yarnold
Optimal Data Analysis, LLC
Novometric analysis is used to predict cigarette smoking (class variable) of 3,577 Anglo-American, 1,001 Mexican-American, and 797 Indian-American (multicategorical attribute) high-school students. Additional categorical attributes used were gender, and dummy-variable indicators of whether the student’s mother, and whether the student’s father, did or did not smoke. The globally optimal model in this application used only gender as an attribute: moderate ESS=27.1; D=5.4; p<0.001. The next more-complex model in the descendant family (moderate ESS=29.7; D=11.8; p’s<0.001) identified five student strata: female Indian-American students had the highest smoking rate (45.6% of 390 students), and male students for whom neither parent smoked had the lowest smoking rate (14.9% of 564 students).
odajournal.com 