The hardware and bandwidth for this mirror is donated by METANET, the Webhosting and Full Service-Cloud Provider.
If you wish to report a bug, or if you are interested in having us mirror your free-software or open-source project, please feel free to contact us at mirror[@]metanet.ch.

blavaan

blavaan is a free, open source R package for Bayesian latent variable analysis. It relies on JAGS and Stan to estimate models via MCMC.

The blavaan functions and syntax are similar to lavaan. For example, consider the Political Democracy example from Bollen (1989):

library(lavaan) # for the PoliticalDemocracy data
library(blavaan)

model <- '
   # latent variable definitions
     ind60 =~ x1 + x2 + x3
     dem60 =~ y1 + y2 + y3 + y4
     dem65 =~ y5 + y6 + y7 + y8
   # regressions
     dem60 ~ ind60
     dem65 ~ ind60 + dem60
   # residual covariances
     y1 ~~ y5
     y2 ~~ y4 + y6
     y3 ~~ y7
     y4 ~~ y8
     y6 ~~ y8
'
fit <- bsem(model, data = PoliticalDemocracy)
summary(fit)

The development version of blavaan (containing updates not yet on CRAN) can be installed via the command below. Compilation is required; this may be a problem for users who currently rely on a binary version of blavaan from CRAN.

remotes::install_github("ecmerkle/blavaan", INSTALL_opts = "--no-multiarch")

For further information, see:

Merkle, E. C., Fitzsimmons, E., Uanhoro, J., & Goodrich, B. (2021). Efficient Bayesian structural equation modeling in Stan. Journal of Statistical Software, 100(6), 1–22.

Merkle, E. C., & Rosseel, Y. (2018). blavaan: Bayesian structural equation models via parameter expansion. Journal of Statistical Software, 85(4), 1–30.

blavaan is supported by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, Grant R305D210044, as well as NSF grants SES-1061334 and 1460719.

These binaries (installable software) and packages are in development.
They may not be fully stable and should be used with caution. We make no claims about them.