Binary Outcomes in GAMLJ3 - No way to pick reference group
Posted: Sun Sep 28, 2025 7:31 pm
I've been doing some work with generalized linear models (in the GAMLJ3 module). I noticed that the module seems to pick the reference group for a binary outcome using some method that is impossible to change, and somehow persists even when recoding the variables. For example, in a DV of 1s and 0s, I would want the model to predict the likelihood of 1s (p1/p0), but it does the opposite (p0/p1). As there is no way that I can see to change the reference group in the options, I simply reverse coded the variable. I don't know how, but now the model has adjusted itself so that it is suddenly predicting 1s (which is again the opposite of what I want). No matter what I code the DV as -- numbers, text, etc -- the model chooses one specific group as its reference. So I guess I'm wondering a) what's going on, and b) can it be changed so that the user can choose a reference group (similar to what is implemented in the logistic regression menu)?