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Latent Classiness and Other Mixtures

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Abstract

The aim of this article is to laud Lindon Eaves’ role in the development of mixture modeling in genetic studies. The specification of models for mixture distributions was very much in its infancy when Professor Eaves implemented it in his own FORTRAN programs, and extended it to data collected from relatives such as twins. It was his collaboration with the author of this article which led to the first implementation of mixture distribution modeling in a general-purpose structural equation modeling program, Mx, resulting in a 1996 article on linkage analysis in Behavior Genetics. Today, the popularity of these methods continues to grow, encompassing methods for genetic association, latent class analysis, growth curve mixture modeling, factor mixture modeling, regime switching, marginal maximum likelihood, genotype by environment interaction, variance component twin modeling in the absence of zygosity information, and many others. This primarily historical article concludes with some consideration of some possible future developments.

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Notes

  1. These probabilities are readily obtained with software such as Mplus or OpenMx.

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Acknowledgments

The author is grateful for support by NIH grants DA-18673 and DA-26119. He would like to acknowledge the members of the Behavior Genetics Association Executive Committee for help in organizing the festschrift, and Dr. Timothy Bates for hosting the meeting in the Moray House, Edinburgh, Scotland.

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  1. Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics, Virginia Commonwealth University, Box 980126, Richmond, VA, 23298-0126, USA

    Michael C. Neale

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  1. Michael C. Neale
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Correspondence to Michael C. Neale.

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Neale, M.C. Latent Classiness and Other Mixtures. Behav Genet 44, 205–211 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10519-013-9637-3

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