Advanced Option

The Advanced Option for Latent GOLD is optional ($200, sold separately) for all Commercial licenses. The Advanced Option is included for free for all Academic licenses.

Continuous latent variables (CFactors)

An option for specifying models containing continuous latent variables, called CFactors, in a cluster, DFactor or regression model. CFactors can be used to specify continuous latent variable models, such as factor analysis and item response theory models, and regression models with continuous random effects. For more details, see:

Popper, Richard, Kroll, Jeff and Magidson, Jay (2004).
"Applications of latent class models to food product development: a case study"
Sawtooth Software Proceedings, 2004.

Multilevel Modeling

An option for defining two-level data variants of any model implemented in Latent GOLD. Group-level variation may be accounted for by specifying group-level latent classes (GClasses) and/or group-level CFactors (GCFactors). In addition, when 2 or more GClasses are specified, group-level covariates (GCovariates) can be included in the model to describe/predict them. The multilevel option can also be used for specifying three-level parametric or nonparametric random-effects regression models. Sumultaneously develop country-level and individual level segments. See:

• Bijmolt, T.H., Paas, L.J., Vermunt , J.K. (2004).
  Country and Consumer Segmentation: Multi-level Latent Class Analysis of Financial Product Ownership
  International Journal of Research in Marketing, 21, 323-340
• Vermunt, J.K, and Magidson, J. (2005).
  Hierarchical mixture models for nested data structures
  In C. Weihs und W. Gaul (eds), Classification: The Ubiquitous Challenge. Heidelberg: Springer.

Survey Options for complex sample data

Two important survey sampling designs are stratified sampling -- sampling cases within strata, and two-stage cluster sampling -- sampling within primary sampling units (PSUs) and subsequent sampling of cases within the selected PSUs. Moreover, sampling weights may exist. The Survey option takes the sampling design and the sampling weights into account when computing standard errors and related statistics associated with the parameter estimates, and estimates the ‘design effect’

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For information on other Advanced Module features, download
Chapter 1 of the Latent GOLD User's Guide