Latent Class Analysis – Help With Conducting Latent Transition Analysis in R

latent-classr

I am new to this site, so my apologies if I am not asking the question the right way for this site. I am actually trying to understand Latent Class Analysis & Latent Transition Analysis. I have read a few articles. I found ProcLTA and ProcLCA in SAS, but in R I could only find poLCA package, and nothing for LTA. The webpage on which I found poLCA is below

http://sas-and-r.blogspot.com/2011/01/example-821-latent-class-analysis.html

Can someone please guide me how to do LTA in R and also what is the difference between Latent Class Analysis and Factor Analysis, as they seem very similar to me. Thanks in advance

Best Answer

I've spent some time on this same question. I never found an R implementation, and I had a good deal of trouble uncovering the details of the SAS implementation. I think I finally found it in a technical note somewhere, but by that time I didn't need it anymore and I can't remember any of it now.

As far as the connection with factor analysis goes, it is factor analysis for categorical-by-categorical data. See here (page 5), among other places. Those slides also point out (although without any details) that LTA is also related to hidden Markov models. Page 19 of those slides list some free programs for fitting LTA models, including an R package that as far as I can tell doesn't exist and was never on CRAN. I did also just find an R package ltm that might be able to fit an LTA model. There's a JSS paper on it by Rizopolous (2006).

edit: In case you want to roll your own in R, technical details are in the PROC LTA User's Guide available here for free after you register an account.

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