Learning Attribute Patterns in High-Dimensional Structured Latent Attribute Models

Yuqi Gu, Gongjun Xu; 20(115):1−58, 2019.

Abstract

Structured latent attribute models (SLAMs) are a special family of discrete latent variable models widely used in social and biological sciences. This paper considers the problem of learning significant attribute patterns from a SLAM with potentially high-dimensional configurations of the latent attributes. We address the theoretical identifiability issue, propose a penalized likelihood method for the selection of the attribute patterns, and further establish the selection consistency in such an overfitted SLAM with a diverging number of latent patterns. The good performance of the proposed methodology is illustrated by simulation studies and two real datasets in educational assessments.