A SAS procedure based on mixture models for estimating developmental trajectories

BL Jones, DS Nagin, K Roeder - Sociological methods & …, 2001 - journals.sagepub.com
Sociological methods & research, 2001journals.sagepub.com
This article introduces a new SAS procedure written by the authors that analyzes
longitudinal data (developmental trajectories) by fitting a mixture model. The TRAJ
procedure fits semiparametric (discrete) mixtures of censored normal, Poisson, zero-inflated
Poisson, and Bernoulli distributions to longitudinal data. Applications to psychometric scale
data, offense counts, and a dichotomous prevalence measure in violence research are
illustrated. In addition, the use of the Bayesian information criterion to address the problem …
This article introduces a new SAS procedure written by the authors that analyzes longitudinal data (developmental trajectories) by fitting a mixture model. The TRAJ procedure fits semiparametric (discrete) mixtures of censored normal, Poisson, zero-inflated Poisson, and Bernoulli distributions to longitudinal data. Applications to psychometric scale data, offense counts, and a dichotomous prevalence measure in violence research are illustrated. In addition, the use of the Bayesian information criterion to address the problem of model selection, including the estimation of the number of components in the mixture, is demonstrated.
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