Residual Analysis in Rasch Poisson Counts Models

Abstract

A Rasch Poisson counts (RPC) model is described to identify individual latent traits and facilities of the items of tests that model the error (or success) count in several tasks over time, instead of modeling the correct responses to items in a test as in the dichotomous item response theory (IRT) model. These types of tests can be more informative than traditional tests. To estimate the model parameters, we consider a Bayesian approach using the integrated nested Laplace approximation (INLA). We develop residual analysis to assess model t by introducing randomized quantile residuals for items. The data used to illustrate the method comes from 228 people who took a selective attention test. The test has 20 blocks (items), with a time limit of 15 seconds for each block. The results of the residual analysis of the RPC were promising and indicated that the studied attention data are not well tted by the RPC model.