Version 0.5-0 of semTools available on CRAN

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Terrence Jorgensen

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Jul 9, 2018, 6:06:11 AM7/9/18

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Version 0.5-0 of semTools has been released on CRAN, which assimilates lavaan's most recent internal changes (therefore requiring at least lavaan version 0.6-1), adds some minor features to a few existing functions, and fixes some bugs.

The biggest change in this version is the re-design of the runMI() function, which no longer produces an object of class lavaanStar (that object class is no longer supported), which inherited from class lavaan. It now produces an object of class lavaan.mi, which inherits from lavaan's new lavaanList class (see the ?lavaanList help page for details). The reasons to redesign runMI() include:

The user was required to choose among available methods for pooling the chi-squared test statistic when fitting the model, and the baseline model was also fit so that incremental fit indices (e.g., CFI and TLI) could be calculated. This lead to more frequent convergence problems.
The lavaanStar class could inadvertently mislead users into thinking that certain results were available from multiple imputations that were not. For example, the modindices() function would return modification indices for the first imputation, but those were not appropriately pooled statistics.

The new runMI() no longer includes the chi= argument, because those options have been moved to an anova() method written for lavaan.mi objects. Additional methods have been written: see the class?lavaan.mi help page for a list of methods and details about their use. Additionally, appropriately pooled modification indices and (S)EPCs are now available for multiple imputations (via modindices.mi()), as well as a general score test via lavTestScore.mi().

The parcelAllocation() has also been redesigned with new arguments to improve its flexibility and ease of use. Users are now required to provide lavaan syntax not only for the parcel-level model, but also for the item-level model. This allows parcel allocation to be automatically detected, no longer requiring users to provide a list of item-to-parcel assignments (see new examples on the help page).

The OpenMx enhancements in previous versions of semTools are obsolete now that OpenMx provides fit indices and standardized paths, so they have been removed. However, standardizeMx() is still available (temporarily deprecated) to provide standardized mean-structure parameters, until the OpenMx maintainers add that feature to OpenMx::mxStandardizeRAMpaths().

measurementInvariance() and measurementInvarianceCat() now require users to name all arguments passed to cfa(), including the first argument: model=. This is to prevent errors that occurred when some previous users had passed arguments in a different order than expected, which should not be a limitation.

Some errors might still occur with lavaan 0.6-1, which have been resolved in version 0.6-2 (see how to install this development version here, until it is released on CRAN). Please continue to report any other issues on the lavaan Google forum or on the GitHub issues site: https://github.com/simsem/semTools/issues

Thanks,

Terrence D. Jorgensen

Postdoctoral Researcher, Methods and Statistics

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