Introduction to Latent Class and Finite Mixture Modeling

This book provides an integrated, detailed introduction to various kinds of latent class (LC) models and their applications. It highlights the importance of LC modeling to identify meaningful segments, such as market segments and disease typologies. It also presents the underpinnings of the basic LC model as a probability model with formal statistical tests. Along with practical model-fitting guidelines, the book includes many insightful examples to illustrate each model and interpret results. To reproduce the examples in the text, a demo version of Latent GOLD® as well as more than 80 data sets are available for download on the author’s website.