In this paper two scales of a personality questionnaire, extraversion and neuroticism, are analyzed using a family of latent trait latent class models. The items are responded to in one of three categories: “yes”, “?”, or “no”. The results show that one single measurement model does not suffice in describing the data. More specifically, the meaning of the “?” response category is not invariant ...

In this project we outline Vedalia, a high performance distributed network for performing inference on latent variable models in the context of Amazon review visualization. We introduce a new model, RLDA, which extends Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) (Blei et al., 2003) for the review space by incorporating auxiliary data available in online reviews to improve modeling while simultaneously re...

In this paper, we compare four different Subspace Multiple Linear Regression methods for 3D face shape prediction from a single 2D intensity image. This problem is situated within the low observation-to-variable ratio context, where the sample covariance matrix is likely to be singular. Lately, efforts have been directed towards latent-variable based methods to estimate a regression operator wh...

The new book by Skrondal and Rabe-Hesketh (2004) is reviewed.

Taxometric analysis was developed to help determine whether a latent variable best conforms to a dimensional or categorical (taxonic) model. One study (Beauchaine & Waters, 2003) found that the taxonic structure of ratings could be influenced through instructional set. Their findings raise questions about whether taxometric analysis is necessarily identifying the organic structure of ratings-ba...

We examine how social relationships are related to pro-environment behaviors. We use new data from a nationally representative U.S. sample to estimate latent cluster models in which we describe individuals’ profiles of social ties with family, neighbor, and coworkers along two dimensions: intensity of connections and pro-environment norms. While our results confirm the link between social ties ...