Dear all 

Last week, I posted a question and some of you spent their valuable time to respond. Thank you (once again). This time, after doing a lot of homework, I return with  a second question on the issue.

I was advised to use poLCA for a Latent Class Analysis with covariates. The software works well, although I feel a bit uncomfortable with the fact that you need to run many times the algorithm to reach the global maxima (so how do we know that we replicated the analysis enough times???). This software solved one of my problems, but now I need a software to be able to compute probability of laten group membersips using ordinal "response" variables and at the same time fit covariates.

I have seven ordinal variables of Political Trust (scale from 0-10 where 0 means no trust and 10 means full trust). Around 50,000 persons completed the questionnaire. I would like to compute the probability of membership for 4 (it seems that this is about the right number) of clusters. Then, I will need to use a small number of covariates to predict membership. Unfortunately, poLCA cannot compute probability of latent group membership for ordinal categorical "response" variables. Can aynone suggest another R package (or any other free package)? 

Or maybe is there  an R package to use my ordinal "response" variables to compute membership probabilities and then (as a second independent analysis) use another software to compute regression coefficients where the membership probabilities will be coninuous(???) dependent variables?

Thnk you for the help

Jason 


Dr. Iasonas Lamprianou
Department of Social and Political Sciences
University of Cyprus



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