Latent class analysis with weighted responses

Abstract: The latent class model has been proposed as a powerful tool for cluster analysis of categorical data in various fields such as social, psychological, behavioral, and biological sciences. However, one important limitation of the latent class model is that it is only suitable for data with binary responses, making it fail to model real-world data with continuous or negative responses. In many applications, ignoring the weights throws out a lot of potentially valuable information contained in the weights. To address this limitation, we propose a novel generative model, the weighted latent class model (WLCM). Our model allows data's response matrix to be generated from an arbitrary distribution with a latent class structure. In comparison to the latent class model, our WLCM is more realistic and more general. To our knowledge, our WLCM is the first model for latent class analysis with weighted responses. We investigate the identifiability of the model and propose an efficient algorithm for estimating the latent classes and other model parameters. We show that the proposed algorithm enjoys consistent estimation. The performance of the proposed algorithm is investigated using both computer-generated and real-world weighted response data.