Classes with very low numbers of subj... PreviousNext
Mplus Discussion > Latent Variable Mixture Modeling >
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 Daniel Cohen posted on Friday, December 18, 2015 - 2:18 pm
Greetings,

I am working on a LPA and we have determined that the appropriate number of classes is 5 based on the lowest BIC. However, we have one class that only has 7 subjects (4% of the sample). Is it problematic to have such a small sample within a particular class?

Thanks!
Dan
 Bengt O. Muthen posted on Friday, December 18, 2015 - 5:48 pm
Mostly in terms of trying to relate that class to other variables.
 Jon Heron posted on Saturday, December 19, 2015 - 12:32 am
It's fairly common to use class size as a selection criterion. Probably not good practice from a statistical perspective but its pointless having a solution you can do nothing with.
 Daniel Cohen posted on Tuesday, January 12, 2016 - 8:50 am
Thank you so much for your responses. I'm a bit of a novice with these types of analyses, so please bear with me. Could you provide a little more detail regarding why you couldn't relate a very small class to other variables? What are the consequences of selecting a solution that includes a very small class?

Thank you!
Dan
 Bengt O. Muthen posted on Tuesday, January 12, 2016 - 6:57 pm
The parameters that are specific to that relationship would be estimated by so few subjects that their estimates and SEs might not be good.
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