ShortForm

News

The argument check for fit statistics (ACO, SA) were updated to include fit statistics related to the “WLSMV” estimator (i.e, for ordered data).

A bug in the SA function that sometimes resulted in improper items has been fixed.
A bug in the Tabu short form function that caused the Tabu list to be erased if the best criterion value was reached has been fixed.

There are now additional checks for the function arguments related to the fit statistics (ACO, SA) and the fit statistic tests (ACO) with informative warnings for when the function arguments are not valid.

This version introduces classes to each of the main function outputs (antcolony.lavaan == “antcolony”, simulatedAnnealing == “simulatedAnnealing”, tabuShortForm == “tabu”)
This will allow for plot and print methods for each of these functions

The function antcolony_plot was replaced with plot.antcolony (aka, a plot method)

With the addition of classes, a plot method and accompanying documentation has been added.
Future updates will expand S3 methods for print() and summary()

Bugfixes to the main functions when using them to create shortforms of bifactor models.
They should now produce actual bifactor shortforms (in 0.4.1, sometimes the item names would be cut off in later iterations [FIXED] and the relationship between latent variables would be changed when they should have been kept constant [FIXED]).

Now, when using an interactive R session, a package message is printed out (with a little Penguin holding it all up)!

The Simulated Annealing (SA) algorithm has been added to the package, with a single user-facing function simulatedAnnealing().
SA can be used on anything lavaan can run, though the current implementation focuses on traditional confirmatory models using lavaan::cfa(). However, there are plans for more user control in the modelling process to allow for other model defaults.

The antcolony_lavaan() function has been modified so that it no longer will print a summaryfile.txt. Rather, the function maintains the old summary file as an internal object and returns it after completion,
The new function antcolony_plot() takes the results from antcolony_lavaan() and creates three graphs: (a) a plot showing how pheremone levels change as the algorithm progresses, (b) a plot showing how the mean value of the regression coefficients changes as the algorithm progresses, and (c) a plot showing how the mean variance explained changes as the algorithm progresses.

Each of the short form functions utilizing lavaan (antcolony.lavaan(), simulatedAnnealing(), tabuShortForm()) are capable of handling bifactor models.
In theory, this means relatively arbitrary models can be specified as well, but the functions utilize the “~” and “~~” operators for the additional functionality as well as the bifactor logical option. No guarantee that an arbitrary model will work beyond those currently tested.

The lavaan-based functions all have more controlled output to the R console. This is most noticeable with the antcolony.lavaan() function.

The Tabu search has been added to the package, with user-facing functions tabu.sem() and search.prep() for most of the heavy lifting and various helper and internal functions. The code was taken primarily from Carl Falk and Katerina Marcoulides (see Marcoulides, K. M., & Falk, C. F. (2018). Model Specification Searches in Structural Equation Modeling with R. Structural Equation Modeling: A Multidisciplinary Journal, 1-8.). These have been tested in limited circumstances, so please report any bugs as you find them!

NEWS.md created.
Description file updated.
Authorship has been updated and URLs have been added to the ant colony functions.
No bugs have been found in the package thus far, but just a reminder for any users that bug reports are helpful and welcome.