Large-Scale Ideal Point Estimation
In: Political analysis: PA ; the official journal of the Society for Political Methodology and the Political Methodology Section of the American Political Science Association, Band 30, Heft 3, S. 346-363
ISSN: 1476-4989
AbstractRecent advances in the study of voting behavior and the study of legislatures have relied on ideal point estimation for measuring the preferences of political actors, and increasingly, these applications have involved very large data matrices. This has proved challenging for the widely available approaches. Limitations of existing methods include excessive computation time and excessive memory requirements on large datasets, the inability to efficiently deal with sparse data matrices, inefficient computation of standard errors, and ineffective methods for generating starting values. I develop an approach for estimating multidimensional ideal points in large-scale applications, which overcomes these limitations. I demonstrate my approach by applying it to a number of challenging problems. The methods I develop are implemented in an r package (ipe).