lavaSeach2

lavaSearch2 is a package for the R software (https://www.r-project.org/) containing diagnostic and inference tools for Latent Variable Models (LVM) estimated by maximum likelihood (ML). It is built upon the lava package (see https://github.com/kkholst/lava): the lava package is used to define and estimate LVM. While lava can also be used to perform diagnostics and inference, lavaSearch2 improves some of the existing tools in lava:

• Better control of the type 1 error rate when performing inference with small samples. The new methods summary2 and compare2 replace the summary and compare functions that performs, respectively, univariate and multivariate Wald tests. The new methods are also applicable to specific gls and lme models (nlme package).
• Better control of the type 1 error rate when adjusting for multiple comparisons with small samples (via the multcomp package). Compared to glht, the function glht2 propagates small sample corrections to multcomp.
• Better detection of local dependencies that are not included in the LVM. The new method modelsearch2 improves the modelsearch method by providing p-values adjusted for multiple comparisons.

Limitations: lavaSearch2 has been design for Gaussian linear latent variable models. This means that it may not work / give valid results:

• in presence of censored or binary outcomes.
• with stratified models (i.e. object of class multigroup).

Installation of lavaSearch2

You can download and install the latest released version of the software (CRAN version) using:

install.packages("lavaSearch2")

For getting the most recent developments (if any!), you can download and install the latest stable version of the software (Github version) using:

devtools::install_github("bozenne/lavaSearch2")

Functionalities

See the vignette “Overview of the functionalities of the package lavaSearch2” in ./vignettes/overview.pdf