lavaan, short for "Latent variable analysis", is an open-source structural equation modeling (SEM) package for the statistical programming language R. Created in 2010 by Yves Rosseel, now a full professor at the Department of Data Analysis, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Ghent University, lavaan is intended to be a free open-source commercial-quality alternative to commercial SEM software packages such as Mplus or IBM's SPSS Amos.
Comparison with other SEM packages A variety of open-source, free, and commercial structural equation modeling software packages are available besides lavaan, such as Amos, SAS PROC CALIS, R package sem, OpenMx, LISREL, EQS, and Mplus. The main difference between packages is the presence of a graphical interface for model specification and presentation of results. Each package differs in terms of its strengths and weaknesses. lavaan was shown to be feature equivalent to commercial packages, with a compact scripting capability even for complex models as a key strength, and the ability to mimic Mplus and EQS results as a special feature. Its main weaknesses are the lack of an integrated graphical user interface and limited options to handle missing data.
Impact At present, lavaan is considered one of the standard structural equation modeling software packages used by researchers when conducting both observational and experimental research; evidenced in its use in studies, part of software reviews, and published books.
It has been downloaded more than 5 million times to date.
Related R packages Several R packages were developed that complement lavaan, such as:
lavaangui: a graphical user interface for the R package lavaan in order to create and visualize lavaan models. lavaanPlot: an extension of lavaan to allow ploting of lavaan models. blavaan: an R package, co-developed by Yves Rosseel, for Bayesian latent variable analysis built upon the lavaan package. bmemLavaan: an R package for estimating and testing mediation effects in models specified by lavaan.
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