Comparison

So far, there are three packages that can be used to fit structural equation modeling (SEM) via penalized likelihood (PL): lslx, lsl, and regsem. The correctness of the fitting results made by these three packages has not been strictly evaluated. Hence, we try to compare the three packages to see whether they can yield numerically the same fitting result. The details of the comparison can be found in the following documents:

• comparison with lsl
• comparison with regsem

Based on our preliminary experiments, we find that

• lslx (0.6.0) and lsl (0.5.6) can yield numerically the same result;
• lslx (0.6.0) and regsem (0.9.2) yield slightly different result (solution made by regsem can be further improved);
• lslx (0.6.0) is most efficient with respect to computation time.

However, further experiments should be conducted to see whether our finding can be generalized.