A mixture of generalized latent variable models for mixed mode and heterogeneous data

In the behavioral, biomedical, and social–psychological sciences, mixed data types such as continuous, ordinal, count, and nominal are common. Subpopulations also often exist and contribute to heterogeneity in the data. In this paper, we propose a mixture of generalized latent variable models (GLVMs) to handle mixed types of heterogeneous data. Different link functions are specified to model data of multiple types. A Bayesian approach, together with the Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method, is used to conduct the analysis. A modified DIC is used for model selection of mixture components in the GLVMs. A simulation study shows that our proposed methodology performs satisfactorily. An application of mixture GLVM to a data set from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth (NLSY) is presented.