Pairwise likelihood estimation for structural equation modeling with ordinal and continuous variables

• A pairwise likelihood (PL) estimation method is developed for structural equation models (SEM) with continuous and ordinal observed variables where covariates may also be included. The proposed methodology starts off with the development of PL for estimating the mean vector and the covariance matrix of a variable vector consisting of continuous and ordinal variables. Later on a parametric structure is given to the mean vector and the covariance matrix according to a general SEM. The suggested method is demonstrated using an example with empirical data. An R code has been written which has been implemented in the R package lavaan (version 0.5-11). Maximum likelihood estimation, as implemented in Mplus (version 5.21) and in LISREL (version 9.10), is not feasible for our example due to its high computational complexity.

Nyckelord

structural equation modeling

pairwise likelihood estimation

continuous and ordinal variables

lavaan

Statistics

Statistik

Publikations- och innehållstyp

vet (ämneskategori)

ovr (ämneskategori)