Insights into Latent Class Analysis
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Abstract:
Latent class analysis is a popular statistical technique for estimating disease prevalence and test sensitivity and specificity. It is used when a gold standard assessment of disease is not available but results of multiple imperfect tests are. We derive analytic expressions for the parameter estimates in terms of the raw data, under the conditional independence assumption. These expressions indicate explicitly how observed two- and three-way associations between test results are used to infer disease prevalence and test operating characteristics. Although reasonable if the conditional independence model holds, the estimators have no basis when it fails. We therefore caution against using the latent class approach in practice.
Subject Area:
Clinical Epidemiology, Epidemiology, Multivariate Analysis
Suggested Citation:
Margaret S. Pepe and Holly Janes, "Insights into Latent Class Analysis" (January 7, 2005). UW Biostatistics Working Paper Series. Working Paper 236.
http://www.bepress.com/uwbiostat/paper236