Can blavan handle categorical data?

[Sarah Alsaadi]

Thanks in advance!

Best,

Sarah

[Ed Merkle]

Sarah,

blavaan cannot currently do this, but it is on the to-do list. Right now, your best bet is to export the JAGS or Stan code, then edit the code to handle ordinal data. But this admittedly requires some expertise.

Best,

Ed

On Mon, Mar 19, 2018 at 8:55 AM, Sarah Alsaadi <sarah....@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks in advance!

Best,

Sarah

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[Terrence Jorgensen]

Right now, your best bet is to export the JAGS or Stan code, then edit the code to handle ordinal data. But this admittedly requires some expertise.

For guidance, you can find a description in chapter 5 this textbook, along with some example BUGS syntax (which is the same as JAGS syntax).

Song & Lee (2012) Basic and Advanced Bayesian Structural Equation Modeling

Terrence D. Jorgensen

Postdoctoral Researcher, Methods and Statistics

Research Institute for Child Development and Education, the University of Amsterdam

UvA web page: http://www.uva.nl/profile/t.d.jorgensen

[Mauricio Garnier-Villarreal]

Sarah

I had worked an example for the Graded Response Model (GRM) using JAGS. GRM is an IRT model for ordered categorical variables.

In this link I show my solution with JAGS for multidimensional GRM, as Ed said you could work from these code or blavaan exported code to adjust it for your case

https://sourceforge.net/p/mcmc-jags/discussion/610036/thread/87f19cd7/

-Mauricio

[Chris Spencer]

Hi All,

I have a follow-up question from this thread.  When you say that Blavaan does not currently support categorical variables, does this include exogenous covariates as well?

Thanks,
Chris

On Monday, March 19, 2018 at 11:15:00 AM UTC-4, Ed Merkle wrote:

Sarah,

blavaan cannot currently do this, but it is on the to-do list. Right now, your best bet is to export the JAGS or Stan code, then edit the code to handle ordinal data. But this admittedly requires some expertise.

Best,

Ed

On Mon, Mar 19, 2018 at 8:55 AM, Sarah Alsaadi <sarah....@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks in advance!

Best,

Sarah

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[Terrence Jorgensen]

When you say that Blavaan does not currently support categorical variables, does this include exogenous covariates as well?

No, there are no distributional assumptions about exogenous variables, so it is arbitrary whether they are continuous or discrete.  For proper interpretation, it is up to you to include dummy codes that make sense.