When scores are used to make decisions about respondents, it is of interest to estimate classification accuracy (CA), the probability of making a correct decision, and classification consistency (CC), the probability of making the same decision across two parallel administrations of the measure. Model-based estimates of CA and CC computed from the…

Latent class analysis (LCA) is a widely used technique for detecting unobserved population heterogeneity in cross-sectional data. Despite its popularity, the performance of LCA is not well understood. In this study, we evaluate the performance of LCA with binary data by examining classification accuracy, parameter estimation accuracy, and coverage…

One important issue in Bayesian estimation is the determination of an effective informative prior. In hierarchical Bayes models, the uncertainty of hyperparameters in a prior can be further modeled via their own priors, namely, hyper priors. This study introduces a framework to construct hyper priors for both the mean and the variance…

High dimensional multivariate data, where the number of variables approaches or exceeds the sample size, is an increasingly common occurrence for social scientists. Several tools exist for dealing with such data in the context of univariate regression, including regularization methods such as Lasso, Elastic net, Ridge Regression, as well as the…

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in estimating and improving subscore reliability. In this study, the multidimensional item response theory (MIRT) and the bi-factor model were combined to estimate subscores, to obtain subscores reliability, and subscores classification. Both the compensatory and partially compensatory MIRT…