View nonlinear relationships in WarpPLS: YouTube video

A new Youtube video is available for WarpPLS:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHrTxWmM43A

This video shows how one can view nonlinear and linear relationships estimated through a structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis using the software WarpPLS.

The video also highlights one fact that makes software like WarpPLS particularly useful - most relationships in nature are nonlinear. This includes relationships in biology, business, sociology, physics etc.

As you will see in this video, the software shows a table with the types of relationships, warped or linear, between latent variables that are linked in the model. The term “warped” is used for relationships that are clearly nonlinear, and the term “linear” for linear or quasi-linear relationships. Quasi-linear relationships are slightly nonlinear relationships, which look linear upon visual inspection on plots of the regression curves that best approximate the relationships.

Plots with the points as well as the regression curves that best approximate the relationships can be viewed by clicking on a cell containing a relationship type description. These cells are the same as those that contain path coefficients, in the path coefficients table.

The plots of relationships between pairs of latent variables provide a much more nuanced view of how each pair of latent variables is related. However, caution must be taken in the interpretation of these plots, especially when the distribution of data points is very uneven.

An extreme example would be a warped plot in which all of the data points would be concentrated on the right part of the plot, with only one data point on the far left part of the plot. That single data point, called an outlier, would influence the shape of the nonlinear relationship. In these cases, the researcher must decide whether the outlier is “good” data that should be allowed to shape the relationship, or is simply “bad” data resulting from a data collection error.