A factor mixture analysis model for multivariate binary data

Abstract: The paper proposes a latent variable model for binary data coming from an unobserved heterogeneous population. The heterogeneity is taken into account by replacing the traditional assumption of Gaussian distributed factors by a finite mixture of multivariate Gaussians. The aim of the proposed model is twofold: it allows to achieve dimension reduction when the data are dichotomous and, simultaneously, it performs model based clustering in the latent space. Model estimation is obtained by means of a maximum likelihood method via a generalized version of the EM algorithm. In order to evaluate the performance of the model a simulation study and two real applications are illustrated.