Dominance Analysis A New Approach to the Problem of Relative Importance of Predictors in Multiple Regression

• Published in: Psychological bulletin Vol. 114; no. 3; pp. 542 - 551
• Main Author: Budescu, David V
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Washington, DC American Psychological Association 01-11-1993; American Psychological Association, etc
• Subjects: Approaches; Biological and medical sciences; Human; Mathematical models; Medical sciences; Multiple Regression; Predictors; Psychology; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychopathology. Psychiatry; Regression analysis; Social research; Statistical Analysis; Statistics; Techniques and methods; Human; Statistical method; Dominance; Regression analysis; Multiple regression; Prediction
• ISSN: 0033-2909; 1939-1455
• DOI: 10.1037/0033-2909.114.3.542

Whenever multiple regression is used to test and compare theoretically motivated models, it
is of interest to determine the relative importance of the predictors. Specifically,
researchers seek to rank order and scale variables in terms of their importance and to express
global statistics of the model as a function of these measures. This article reviews the many
meanings of importance of predictors in multiple regression, highlights their weaknesses, and
proposes a new method for comparing variables: dominance analysis. Dominance is a qualitative
relation defined in a pairwise fashion: One variable is said to dominate another if it is more
useful than its competitor in all subset regressions. Properties of the newly proposed method
are described and illustrated.