Longitudinal Data Analysis and Time Series Commons^™

Multilevel Latent Class Models With Dirichlet Mixing Distribution, Chong-Zhi Di, Karen Bandeen-Roche

Chongzhi Di

Latent class analysis (LCA) and latent class regression (LCR) are widely used for modeling multivariate categorical outcomes in social sciences 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 paper, we consider multilevel latent class models, in which sub-population 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 …