Advances in Methods, Theories, and Philosophy

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Paper Number

2126

Paper Type

short

Description

The use of interaction terms in partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) risks overfitting models to small samples and producing poor out-of-sample generalizability. But the added complexity of interactions in PLS-SEM is not captured by in-sample fit metrics, and we propose that interaction terms in PLS-SEM should be assessed by out-of-sample methods and metrics. However, out-of-sample predictive methods like PLSpredict do not yet account for interaction terms. We start by providing a formal procedure for generating out-of-sample predictions from such models. We then empirically demonstrate that interactions produce far higher Type I error than that expected by researchers, and that out-of-sample predictive metrics indeed offer more accurate assessment of the validity of interaction terms for PLS-SEM. We also show that two-stage estimation of interactions is superior to other popular methods of operationalizing interactions in PLS-SEM, when the generalizability of interactions is of concern.

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20-Theory

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Dec 11th, 12:00 AM

Predictive Validation of Interaction Terms in PLS-SEM

The use of interaction terms in partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) risks overfitting models to small samples and producing poor out-of-sample generalizability. But the added complexity of interactions in PLS-SEM is not captured by in-sample fit metrics, and we propose that interaction terms in PLS-SEM should be assessed by out-of-sample methods and metrics. However, out-of-sample predictive methods like PLSpredict do not yet account for interaction terms. We start by providing a formal procedure for generating out-of-sample predictions from such models. We then empirically demonstrate that interactions produce far higher Type I error than that expected by researchers, and that out-of-sample predictive metrics indeed offer more accurate assessment of the validity of interaction terms for PLS-SEM. We also show that two-stage estimation of interactions is superior to other popular methods of operationalizing interactions in PLS-SEM, when the generalizability of interactions is of concern.

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