Hierarchical Dirichlet Process Mixture of Products of Multinomial Distributions: Applications to Survey Data with Potentially Missing Values

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Wongkamthong, Chayut
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866909440866779136
author Wongkamthong, Chayut
author_facet Wongkamthong, Chayut
contents In social science research, understanding latent structures in populations through survey data with categorical responses is a common and important task. Traditional methods like Factor Analysis and Latent Class Analysis have limitations, particularly in handling categorical data and accommodating mixed memberships in latent structures, respectively. Moreover, choosing the number of factors or latent classes is often subjective and can be challenging in the presence of missing values. This study introduces a Hierarchical Dirichlet Process Mixture of Products of Multinomial Distributions (HDPMPM) model, which leverages the flexibility of nonparametric Bayesian methods to address these limitations. The HDPMPM model allows for multiple latent classes within individuals and avoids fixing the number of mixture components at an arbitrary number. Additionally, it incorporates missing data imputation directly into the model's Gibbs sampling process. By applying a truncated stick-breaking representation of the Dirichlet process, we can derive a Gibbs sampling scheme for posterior inference. An application of the HDPMPM model to the 2016 American National Election Study (ANES) data demonstrates its effectiveness in identifying political profiles and handling missing data scenarios, including those that are missing at random (MAR) and missing completely at random (MCAR). The results show that the HDPMPM model successfully recovers dominant profiles and manages complex latent structures in survey data, providing an alternative tool for social science researchers in dealing with categorical data with missing values.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_17335
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Hierarchical Dirichlet Process Mixture of Products of Multinomial Distributions: Applications to Survey Data with Potentially Missing Values
Wongkamthong, Chayut
Methodology
In social science research, understanding latent structures in populations through survey data with categorical responses is a common and important task. Traditional methods like Factor Analysis and Latent Class Analysis have limitations, particularly in handling categorical data and accommodating mixed memberships in latent structures, respectively. Moreover, choosing the number of factors or latent classes is often subjective and can be challenging in the presence of missing values. This study introduces a Hierarchical Dirichlet Process Mixture of Products of Multinomial Distributions (HDPMPM) model, which leverages the flexibility of nonparametric Bayesian methods to address these limitations. The HDPMPM model allows for multiple latent classes within individuals and avoids fixing the number of mixture components at an arbitrary number. Additionally, it incorporates missing data imputation directly into the model's Gibbs sampling process. By applying a truncated stick-breaking representation of the Dirichlet process, we can derive a Gibbs sampling scheme for posterior inference. An application of the HDPMPM model to the 2016 American National Election Study (ANES) data demonstrates its effectiveness in identifying political profiles and handling missing data scenarios, including those that are missing at random (MAR) and missing completely at random (MCAR). The results show that the HDPMPM model successfully recovers dominant profiles and manages complex latent structures in survey data, providing an alternative tool for social science researchers in dealing with categorical data with missing values.
title Hierarchical Dirichlet Process Mixture of Products of Multinomial Distributions: Applications to Survey Data with Potentially Missing Values
topic Methodology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.17335