Combinatoric search for types and antitypes

Kieser and Victor (1991) put forward a combinatoric way of hunting for types in contingency tables. Here that strategy gets placed inside the standard methodology of configural frequency analysis (CFA), so it no longer stands apart as a separate technique but works as one procedure within the familiar framework.

The search procedure itself has been extended. We add several new terms to it, and those additions produce noticeable gains in how well the method identifies types and antitypes.

To judge whether the extension actually pays off, we ran the combinatoric algorithm against four other CFA test procedures. The simulation covered a range of conditions, and across every one of them the new algorithm came out ahead of the alternatives.

Key words: contingency table, configural frequency analysis, CFA, search for types, statistical test, simulation, continuity correction.