Multilevel latent class models with dirichlet mixing distribution.

ABSTRACT: Latent class analysis (LCA) and latent class regression (LCR) are widely used for modeling multivariate categorical outcomes in social science and biomedical studies. Standard analyses assume data of different respondents to be mutually independent, excluding application of the methods to familial and other designs in which participants are clustered. In this article, we consider multilevel latent class models, in which subpopulation mixing probabilities are treated as random effects that vary among clusters according to a common Dirichlet distribution. We apply the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm for model fitting by maximum likelihood (ML). This approach works well, but is computationally intensive when either the number of classes or the cluster size is large. We propose a maxim

SUBMITTER: Di CZ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2988887 | biostudies-literature | 2011 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature