Extending mixture of experts model to investigate heterogeneity of trajectories: When, where, and how to add which covariates.
Psychol Methods
; 28(1): 152-178, 2023 Feb.
Article
en En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-35617227
ABSTRACT
Researchers are usually interested in examining the impact of covariates when separating heterogeneous samples into latent classes that are more homogeneous. The majority of theoretical and empirical studies with such aims have focused on identifying covariates as predictors of class membership in the structural equation modeling framework. In other words, the covariates only indirectly affect the sample heterogeneity. However, the covariates' influence on between-individual differences can also be direct. This article presents a mixture model that investigates covariates to explain within-cluster and between-cluster heterogeneity simultaneously, known as a mixture-of-experts (MoE) model. This study aims to extend the MoE framework to investigate heterogeneity in nonlinear trajectories to identify latent classes, covariates as predictors to clusters, and covariates that explain within-cluster differences in change patterns over time. Our simulation studies demonstrate that the proposed model generally estimates the parameters unbiasedly, precisely, and exhibits appropriate empirical coverage for a nominal 95% confidence interval. This study also proposes implementing structural equation model forests to shrink the covariate space of the proposed mixture model. We illustrate how to select covariates and construct the proposed model with longitudinal mathematics achievement data. Additionally, we demonstrate that the proposed mixture model can be further extended in the structural equation modeling framework by allowing the covariates that have direct effects to be time-varying. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).
Texto completo:
1
Colección:
01-internacional
Base de datos:
MEDLINE
Asunto principal:
Modelos Teóricos
Tipo de estudio:
Prognostic_studies
Límite:
Humans
Idioma:
En
Revista:
Psychol Methods
Asunto de la revista:
PSICOLOGIA
Año:
2023
Tipo del documento:
Article