Beginning with SEM in lavaan III

This post concludes the translation from LISREL’s to R’s of Iacobucci’s paper: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About SEM (Structural Equations Modeling) But Were Afraid to Ask. This post covers the full structural equation model.

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Beginning with SEM in lavaan II

This post continues the getting started with structural equation modeling series inspired by Dawn Iacobucci’s article: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About SEM (Structural Equations Modeling) But Were Afraid to Ask. In the series, I translate Iacobucci’s LISREL syntax into R lavaan’s.

Beginning with SEM in lavaan

While reordering some old papers I rediscovered a paper by Dawn Iacobucci introducing structural equation modeling: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About SEM (Structural Equations Modeling) But Were Afraid to Ask. I liked Iacobucci’s introduction to SEM because it was eloquently written, clear and accessible. Moreover, Iacobucci accompanied the paper with a data-set and step-by-step explanation of the syntax to analyze it. This allowed the reproduction of her analysis to all the adventurous readers willing to start with structural equation modeling. Iacobucci used LISREL for the data-analysis and, at the time, I had no access to LISREL. Now, however, with lavaan available, when I encountered the paper again I saw an opportunity to make her approach reproducible by a wider audience since lavaan is available to anyone and its syntax is very intuitive. In this post I translate Iacobucci’s LISREL syntax to lavaan.

Multiple mediation: extracting output

Lavaan’s output is copious. Especially when fitting a complex model, lavaan’s output is literally a mine of information. Finding what is relevant is not always easy, therefore I will try to describe a way to summarize lavaan’s summary output.

Plotting multiple mediation

This posts on multiple mediation on lavaan supplements the two previous ones (1 – introducing multiple mediator analysis with lavaan and 2 – showing an example analysis) by describing how to process lavaan’s output graphically. I discovered the handy package semPlot and I am very positive about it. I will make the example as reproducible as possible, so that each step can be repeated. Also, I am going to try to provide more explanation about the R commands I used because a friend pointed out that the description of the steps was sometimes a bit dry and abstract.

Multiple-mediation example with lavaan

This post extends this previous one on multiple-mediation with lavaan. Here I modeled a ‘real’ dataset instead of a randomly generated one. This dataset we used previously for a paper published some time ago. There we investigated whether fear of an imperfect fat self was a stronger mediator than hope of a perfect thin self on dietary restraint in college women. At the time of the paper’s publication we performed the analysis using the SPSS macro INDIRECT . However,

Multiple-mediator analysis with lavaan

I wrote this brief introductory post for my friend Simon. I want to show how easy the transition from SPSS to R can be. In the specific case of mediation analysis the transition to R can be very smooth because, thanks to lavaan, the R knowledge required to use the package is minimal. Analysis of mediator effects in lavaan requires only the specification of the model, all the other processes are automated by the package. So, after reading in the data, running the test is trivial.

Four dimensions in two dimensions

This scatterplot is one of the best data visualisation I made. I like it because it concentrates a lot of information into a single visualisation. The scatterplot displays four dimensional data (i.e., four variables) using a two dimensional scatterplot. I made the first implementation in R, but because I wanted to add interactivity I switched to d3.js. Below I describe the choices I made to display the information and how I coded them in d3.js.

Clustering Pumps [mlw4]

This is the fourth and last assignment of Machine Learning for Data Analysis by Wesleyan University on Coursera. My assignment diverges quite a bit from the approach taken by the instructor since I wanted to have only three clusters to determine pumps functionality (functional, functional needs repair, and

Shrinking pumps? [mlw3]

This is the third assignment of the Machine Learning for Data Analysis by Wesleyan University on Coursera. I applied least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) to the DrivenData data set pumpItUp. LASSO is a technique which does variable selection shrinking the ‘useless’ coefficients (i.e., variables) toward zero. Applying this method