We propose a causal analysis of the mother’s educational level on the health status of the newborn, in terms of gestational weeks and weight. The analysis is based on a finite mixture structural equation model, the parameters of which have a causal interpretation. The model is applied to a...

Objectives We investigate about the differences in birthweight between firstand second-borns, evaluating the impact of changes in pregnancy (e.g., gestational age), demographic (e.g., age), and social (e.g., education level, marital status) maternal characteristics. Data and Methods All analyses...

We propose a finite mixture latent trajectory model to study the behavior of firms in terms of open-ended employment contracts that are activated and terminated during a certain period. The model is based on the assumption that the population of firms is composed by unobservable clusters (or...

An alternative to using normally distributed random effects in modeling clustered binary and ordered responses is based on using a finite-mixture. This approach gives rise to a flexible class of generalized linear mixed models for item responses, multilevel data, and longitudinal data. A test of...

The paper investigates the problem of determining patterns of criminal behaviour from official criminal histories, concentrating on the variety and type of offending convictions. The analysis is carried out on the basis of a multivariate latent Markov model which allows for discrete covariates...

We demonstrate the use of a multidimensional extension of the latent Markov model to analyse data from studies with repeated binary responses in developmental psychology. In particular, we consider an experiment based on a battery of tests which was administered to pre-school children, at three...

The evaluation of nursing homes and the assessment of the quality of the health care provided to their patients are usually based on the administration of questionnaires made of a large number of polytomous items. In applications involving data collected by questionnaires of this type, the...

We develop a recursion for hidden Markov model of any order h, which allows us to obtain the posterior distribution of the latent state at every occasion, given the previous h states and the observed data. With respect to the well-known Baum-Welch recursions, the proposed recursion has the...

We provide a comprehensive overview of latent Markov (LM) models for the analysis of longitudinal data. The main assumption behind these models is that the response variables are conditionally independent given a latent process which follows a first-order Markov chain. We first illustrate the...

In the context of multilevel longitudinal data, where sample units are collected in clusters, an important aspect that should be accounted for is the unobserved heterogeneity between sample units and between clusters. For this aim we propose an approach based on nested hidden (latent) Markov...