Mplus

Mplus is a statistical modeling program that provides researchers with a flexible tool to analyze their data. Mplus offers researchers a wide choice of models, estimators, and algorithms in a program that has an easy-to-use interface and graphical displays of data and analysis results. Mplus allows the analysis of both cross-sectional and longitudinal data, single-level and multilevel data, and data that come from different populations with either observed or unobserved heterogeneity. Analyses can be carried out for observed variables that are continuous, censored, binary, ordered categorical (ordinal), unordered categorical (nominal), counts, or combinations of these variable types. Mplus also has special features for missing data, complex survey data, and multilevel data. In addition, Mplus has extensive capabilities for Monte Carlo simulation studies, where data can be generated and analyzed according to any of the models included in the program. The generality of the Mplus modeling framework comes from the unique use of both continuous and categorical latent variables. Continuous latent variables are used to represent factors corresponding to unobserved constructs, random effects corresponding to individual differences in development, random effects corresponding to variation in coefficients across groups in hierarchical data, frailties corresponding to unobserved heterogeneity in survival time, liabilities corresponding to genetic susceptibility to disease, and latent response variable values corresponding to missing data. Categorical latent variables are used to represent latent classes corresponding to homogeneous groups of individuals, latent trajectory classes corresponding to types of development in unobserved populations, mixture components corresponding to finite mixtures of unobserved populations, and latent response variable categories corresponding to missing data.