Mplus and R

The Mplus GH5 File

The Mplus GH5 file was first introduced with Version 6.  It replaced the GPH file produced in previous Mplus versions which contained Mplus plot data.  The GH5 file contains Mplus plot data in HDF5 format.  The binary format helps to reduce the size of the file for analyses with a lot of plot data and increase the speed in reading in this plot data.

While the Mplus Mac OS X and Linux versions are available only from the command line and do not come with the Mplus Editor and the graphics module for viewing plots, a set of R functions is provided to assist users view plot and extract data from the GH5 file. A more detailed explanation of the information stored in the GH5 file is also provided.

R and the HDF5 Package

The R program is available from the CRAN website. In order to read the GH5 file created by Mplus, the HDF5 package must be loaded in R. The latest version of the HDF5 package is version 1.6.9 and is compatible with the latest version of R for Mac OS X and Linux operating systems.

Note that while the set of R functions has been written with users of Mplus Mac OS X and Linux versions in mind, the use of the GH5 file in R with the HDF5 package is not limited to these operating systems. Users of Mplus Windows can also load the GH5 file into R for Windows. Currently, the latest version of the HDF5 package is compatible with R for Windows version 2.11.0.

The File mplus.R

The file mplus.R contains the set of R functions to assist users view plots and extract plot data from the GH5 file created from an Mplus run. These functions can be loaded into R using the source command to load the mplus.R file.  A description of each function and its syntax are given in the Mplus GH5 R document.