A Stata Plugin for Estimating Group-Based Trajectory Models推荐.pdf

A Stata Plugin for Estimating Group-Based Trajectory Models Bobby L. Jones University of Pittsburgh Medical Center Daniel S. Nagin Carnegie Mellon University May 21, 2012 This work was generously supported by National Science Foundation Grants SES-102459 and SES- 0647576 Abstract Group-based trajectory models are used to investigate population differences in the developmental courses of behaviors or outcomes . This article demonstrates a new Stata command, traj, for fitting to longitudinal data finite (discrete) mixture models designed to identify clusters of individuals following similar progressions of some behavior or outcome over age or time. Censored normal, Poisson, zero-inflated Poisson, and Bernoulli distributions are supported. Applications to psychometric scale data, count data, and a dichotomous prevalence measure are illustrated. Introduction A developmental trajectory measures the course of an outcome over age or time. The study of developmental trajectories is a central theme of developmental and abnormal psychology and psychiatry, of life course studies in sociology and criminology, of physical and biological outcomes in medicine and gerontology. A wide variety of statistical methods are used to study these phenomena. This article demonstrates a Stata plugin for estimating group-based trajectory models. The Stata program we demonstrate adapts a well-established SAS-based procedure for estimating group-based trajectory model (Jones, Nagin, and Roeder, 2001; Jones and Nagin, 2007) to the Stata platform. Group-based trajectory modeling is a specialized form of finite mixture modeling. The method is designed identify groups of individuals following similarly developmental trajectories. For a recent