Control Mplus from R using MplusAutomation

This tutorial shows how you can use MplusAutomation to run Mplus analyses from R, and demonstrates the tidySEM package for plotting and tabulating results. Use remotes::install_github("cjvanlissa/tidySEM") to get the latest version. Using MplusAutomation, you can automate your analyses, so you can run models in bulk; benefit from R's superior tabulation and plotting facilities; perform downstream calculations on the Mplus output; and make a dynamically generated document that automatically includes your results.

[@jieyingchen4026]

Thank you so much for creating this tutorial! I can't say enough about how much it helps! I'm also amazed by how clear and fluent your video is. A joy to watch!

[@Terrymyc]

Hi Caspar, came across your tutorial here! I am working on a large scale RI-LTA model and this is very helpful! Thank you! --Terry

[@elladaniel5718]

Thank you so much! This is just unblievable, to be sending a question to the www, and be answered by such a detailed and informative video.

[@jiseulsophiaahn796]

Thanks a lot Caspar for such a great video. I should be able to work so much more efficiently with this. As for R, it is nice to have someone show which functions to use in which package. :)

[@JSinval]

Great video! Very useful to use with the ILSA's data.

[@xsl-l6c]

I want to explain why some path coefficients are fixed at 1, thank you

[@maryputt9468]

Very nice. Thank you

[@lility12]

Great tutorial! Super clear and helpful:) I had one problem- when running the graph_sem/prepare_graph functions I got an error (for sure my bad :)). Any idea how to fix it? Error in prepare_graph.default(res, layout = lay, angle = 179, fix_coord = TRUE) : Argument 'edges' must have columns 'from' and 'to'.

[@CJvanLissa]

Yes, there is a known issue with this function. I'm pushing a fix to CRAN this week. Meanwhile, try: remotes::install_github("cjvanlissa/tidySEM") and I think it wil work.

[@njbotor]

Hi Prof van Lissa! This is an awesome video. I have been looking for a demo and I landed on your website. By any chance, do you have a tutorial or a script on how to do LCA and k-fold cross-validation using MplusAutomation package? Thanks a lot!

[@CJvanLissa]

Thank you! As LCA is an unsupervised learning mrthod, I don't think cross validation is relevant (what's the error metric when there's no outcome?). Also, you might want to look at cjvanlissa.github.io/tidySEM/articles/lca_exploratory.html

[@njbotor]

Prof @@CJvanLissa Thanks a lot for answering my query and sharing this material. :) Very helpful.

[@teketokassaw3692]

Thank you very much, Caspar. I have issues when I run mplusModeler. Error in path.expand(path) : invalid 'path' argument Could you have a comment?

[@Phillipkwood]

Very nice tutorial! Any thoughts on how to generate graphs for finite mixture models?

[@CJvanLissa]

That depends.. there's functionality to plot the distributions of the data in such models in both tidySEM and MplusAutomation (tidySEM is more up to date), or do you mean drawing a graph of the relationships between the variables?

[@dyd1983]

Excellent! Well done

[@sicongliu1484]

Great video and very helpful!! I followed through but when running "mplusModeler", the results have just NULLs. Could you offer some possible causes? I do have some missing values in the R data as NAs. Does this matter? I am using Mplus 8.3. Thanks much!

[@sicongliu1484]

Never mind. It turned out that my model is not converging and I increased the iteration# (10e4) and lessened convergence criterion (0.5e-3) to get the estimates. Please share thoughts if you think it is not appropriate (given a sample size ~3000 and 15 variables forming ~ 5 factors). Thanks again for the awesome video!

[@NormanMendoza0421]

Can we do use this package for Mulitlevel SEM?

[@CJvanLissa]

Yes, the MplusAutomation package just communicates with Mplus so you can use all of its functionality. TidySEM can tabulate and plot multilevel models too.

[@JZhu-sv8fx]

@@CJvanLissa Thank you very much Casper. How about the Indirect Effect, also workable? Also, can the package read an already existed Mplus output (that generated by Mplus) and then I present the results by using it as R variables? Thank you very much in advance.

[@CJvanLissa]

@@JZhu-sv8fx yes, use readModels(filename)

[@JZhu-sv8fx]

@@CJvanLissa Thank you very much Caspar.