1. A method, comprising: calculating, using a computer, basic statistics for a pair of categorical predictor variables and a target variable from a dataset during a single pass over the dataset; and determining, using the computer, whether there is a significant interaction effect for the pair of categorical predictor variables on the target variable by: calculating, using the computer, a log-likelihood value for a full generalized linear model without estimating model parameters; calculating, using the computer, the model parameters for a reduced generalized linear model with a recursive marginal mean accumulation technique using the basic statistics; calculating, using the computer, a log-likelihood value for the reduced generalized linear model; calculating, using the computer, a likelihood ratio test statistic using the log-likelihood value for the full generalized linear model and the log-likelihood value for the reduced generalized linear model; calculating, using the computer, a p-value of the likelihood ratio test statistic; and comparing, using the computer, the p-value to a significance level.