A comparison of Bayesian to maximum likelihood estimation for latent growth models in the presence of a binary outcome

Su Young Kim, David Huh, Zhengyang Zhou, Eun Young Mun

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

9 Scopus citations

Abstract

Latent growth models (LGMs) are an application of structural equation modeling and frequently used in developmental and clinical research to analyze change over time in longitudinal outcomes. Maximum likelihood (ML), the most common approach for estimating LGMs, can fail to converge or may produce biased estimates in complex LGMs especially in studies with modest samples. Bayesian estimation is a logical alternative to ML for LGMs, but there is a lack of research providing guidance on when Bayesian estimation may be preferable to ML or vice versa. This study compared the performance of Bayesian versus ML estimators for LGMs by evaluating their accuracy via Monte Carlo (MC) simulations. For the MC study, longitudinal data sets were generated and estimated using LGM via both ML and Bayesian estimation with three different priors, and parameter recovery across the two estimators was evaluated to determine their relative performance. The findings suggest that ML estimation is a reasonable choice for most LGMs, unless it fails to converge, which can occur with limiting data situations (i.e., just a few time points, no covariate or outcome, modest sample sizes). When models do not converge using ML, we recommend Bayesian estimation with one caveat that the influence of the priors on estimation may have to be carefully examined, per recent recommendations on Bayesian modeling for applied researchers.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)447-457
Number of pages11
JournalInternational Journal of Behavioral Development
Volume44
Issue number5
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Sep 2020

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2020.

Keywords

  • Bayesian estimation
  • Latent growth model
  • binary outcome
  • diffuse priors
  • maximum likelihood estimation

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