In large-scale educational surveys, a latent regression model is used to compensate for the shortage of cognitive information. Conventionally, the covariates in the latent regression model are principal components extracted from background data. This operational method has several important disadvantages, such as the handling of missing data and…

A general program for item-response analysis is described that uses the stabilized Newton-Raphson algorithm. This program is written to be compliant with Fortran 2003 standards and is sufficiently general to handle independent variables, multidimensional ability parameters, and matrix sampling. The ability variables may be either polytomous or…

Steinley and Brusco (2011) presented the results of a huge simulation study aimed at evaluating cluster recovery of mixture model clustering (MMC) both for the situation where the number of clusters is known and is unknown. They derived rather strong conclusions on the basis of this study, especially with regard to the good performance of…

Canonical weights and structure correlations are used to construct low dimensional views of the relationships between two sets of variables. These views, in the form of biplots, display familiar statistics: correlations between pairs of variables, and regression coefficients. (SLD)

A constrained component analysis method, which bears a formal resemblance to the confirmatory factor analysis methods developed by K. G. Joreskog (1969) and others, is presented. In confirmatory factor analysis, the constraints allow the testing of formally structural hypotheses within a model that is falsifiable, even in its "just…

This paper provides a method for analyzing data consisting of event sequences and covariate observations associated with Markov chains. The objective is to use the covariate data to explain differences between individuals in the transition probability matrices characterizing their sequential data. (TJH)

The Second International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM2009) was held at the University of Cordoba, Spain, on July 1-3, 2009. EDM brings together researchers from computer science, education, psychology, psychometrics, and statistics to analyze large data sets to answer educational research questions. The increase in instrumented…