Many thanks, Anca Murray Jorgensen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: I have not used Latent Gold but I can talk in general about the use of mixture models in clustering. The statement "based on means and not on probabilities" seems wrong.
All mixture models are based on viewing the data as a sample from a finite mixture of probability distributions, each with an assumed parametric form. When the mixture components are well=separated in the data the clustering obtained is reasonably robust to the assumed form. When the components overlap substantially there can be identifiability problems and the form of the assumed distributions becomes more influential on the solution. Traditional statistical tests based on asymptotics are not of much relevance because the number of parameters for these models is usually large in comparison to the number of observations. Resampling may be of use though, not so much for obtaining confidence regions for component model parameters and mixture proportions as for see whether the main features of a maximum likelihood solution are reproduced in resamples. John Ubersax's Latent Class Pages http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/jsuebersax/ are a good resource for mixture models, although most attention is given to discrete variables. David Dowe's mixture modelling page http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~dld/cluster.html is a useful resource and collection of links. Murray Jorgensen SUBSCRIBE CLASS-L Anonymous" wrote: > Hello > > Does anyone know why p-values and chi-squared statistics are not available in > Latent Gold summary output for models using continuous variables and what is > the statistical explanation behind it? > > Also, how reliable is the classification with continuous variables in latent > gold > given the fact that it is based - from my understanding - on means and not on > probabilities? > > Many thanks > Anca > > ---------------------------------------------- > CLASS-L list. > Instructions: http://www.classification-society.org/csna/lists.html#class-l > > -- Dr Murray Jorgensen http://www.stats.waikato.ac.nz/Staff/maj.html Department of Statistics, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fax 7 838 4155 Phone +64 7 838 4773 wk Home +64 7 825 0441 Mobile 021 1395 862 ---------------------------------------------- CLASS-L list. Instructions: http://www.classification-society.org/csna/lists.html#class-l --------------------------------- Everyone is raving about the all-new Yahoo! Mail beta. ---------------------------------------------- CLASS-L list. Instructions: http://www.classification-society.org/csna/lists.html#class-l
