Contributions to Bayesian Structural Equation Modeling

Structural equation models (SEMs) are multivariate latent variable models used to model causality structures in data. A Bayesian estimation and validation of SEMs is proposed and identifiability of parameters is studied. The latter study shows that latent variables should be standardized in the analysis to ensure identifiability. This heuristics is in fact introduced to deal with complex identifiability constraints. To illustrate the point, identifiability constraints are calculated in a marketing application, in which posterior draws of the constraints are derived from the posterior conditional distributions of parameters.