The MplusAutomation package leverages the flexibility of the R language to automate latent variable model estimation and interpretation using 'Mplus', a powerful latent variable modeling program developed by Muthen and Muthen (http://www.statmodel.com). Specifically, MplusAutomation provides routines for creating related groups of models, running batches of models, and extracting and tabulating model parameters and fit statistics.

Details

The MplusAutomation package has four primary purposes:

  1. To automatically run groups/batches of models.

  2. To provide routines to extract model fit statistics, parameter estimates, and raw data from 'Mplus' output files.

  3. To facilitate comparisons among models

  4. To provide a template language that allows for the creation of related input files.

The core routine for running batches of models is runModels, with an easy-to-use GUI wrapper, runModels_Interactive.

The core routine for extracting information from 'Mplus' outputs is readModels, which returns a list containing all output sections that the package can extract.

To extract summaries, parameters, modification indices, SAVEDATA output, and all other sections that the package can understand, use the readModels function. This is the recommended way to extract 'Mplus' output with this package. If the target argument to readModels is a single .out file, an mplus.model (that is also a list) will be returned containing all output sections that the package can extract. If target is a directory, a list of mplus.model objects will be returned, named according to the output filenames.

Note: extractModelSummaries is deprecated and readModels should be preferred. To extract model summary statistics from one or more output files, see extractModelSummaries, which returns a data.frame of fit statistics for models located within a directory. Model fit results can be summarized in tabular form (for comparing among models) using showSummaryTable (displays table in separate window), HTMLSummaryTable (creates HTML file containing summary table), or LatexSummaryTable (returns a LaTex-formatted table of summary statistics).

Deprecated: To extract raw data created by the SAVEDATA command (e.g., class membership probabilities or factor scores), see getSavedata_Data.

Deprecated: To extract unstandardized or standardized parameter estimates from a single output file, see extractModelParameters.

Detailed model fit and parameter comparisons between two models can be obtained using compareModels.

To create a group of related models from a single template, see createModels. Please read the MplusAutomation vignette provided along with the package (and on the CRAN website) in order to understand the template language: vignette("Vignette", package="MplusAutomation").

In addition to the major functions above, a function for converting an R data.frame for use with 'Mplus' is provided: prepareMplusData. This converts the data.frame to a tab-delimited file and provides an 'Mplus' syntax stub for variable names.

Package:MplusAutomation
Type:Package
Version:0.8
Date:2020-09-28
License:LGPL-3
LazyLoad:yes

References

Mplus software. Muthen and Muthen. http://www.statmodel.com

See also

See runModels for an example running a model.

Author

Michael Hallquist michael.hallquist@gmail.com, Joshua F. Wiley jwiley.psych@gmail.com

Maintainer: Michael Hallquist michael.hallquist@gmail.com