Discriminant Partial Least-Squares via Splines: An application to evaluate Patient Satisfaction

In this paper we propose an explorative study for the evaluation of Patient Satisfaction in hospital through linear and non linear Discriminat Partial Least Squares. This technique permits to study the dependence relationships between the ordinal variable “satisfaction” in function of variables of different nature, highly correlated, which reveal patient judgements on service quality. To decide on the optimal model dimension we compute the Generalized Cross Validation (GCV), as alternative to the PRESS criterion, well known in literature to check model validity and stability (Cross Validation).