Journal of Applied Mathematics and Decision Sciences
Volume 5 (2001), Issue 4, Pages 235-251
doi:10.1155/S1173912601000177
A statistical comparison of three goodness-of-fit criteria used in
modelling distances
Management Science/Information Systems Area, Michael G. DeGroote School of Business, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Copyright © 2001 Robert F. Love and Halit Üster. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract
Distance predicting functions may be used in a variety of applications for estimating travel distances between points. To evaluate the accuracy of a distance predicting function and to determine its parameters, a goodness-of-fit criteria is employed. AD (Absolute Deviations), SD (Squared Deviations) and NAD (Normalized Absolute Deviations) are the three criteria that are mostly employed in practice. In the literature some assumptions have been made about the properties of each criterion. In this paper, we present statistical analyses performed to compare the three criteria from different perspectives. For this purpose, we employ the ℓkpθ-norm as the distance predicting function, and statistically compare the three criteria by using normalized absolute prediction error distributions in seventeen geographical regions. We find that there exist no significant differences between the criteria. However, since the criterion SD has desirable properties in terms of distance modelling procedures, we suggest its use in practice.