================================================== METRON – Call for Papers for the Special Issue “Latent Variable Models for the analysis of socio-economic data” Guest Editors: Marco Alfó and Francesco Bartolucci ==================================================

Latent variable (LV) models represent an important stream of the statistical literature with application in many fields, such as economics, medicine, psychology, and sociology, and are related to other important classes, such as that of finite mixture models. LV models are naturally applied whenever unobserved heterogeneity between sample units has to be taken into account, typically in a multilevel or longitudinal study, or the characteristic of interest (e.g. quality-of-life of patients suffering from a certain disease) is not directly observable.

The special issue is intended to cover approaches based either on continuous or discrete latent variable models, with also particular interest in approaches that combine the use of continuous and discrete latent variables within the same model. The focus is on:

- novel statistical approaches in terms of modelling formulations and/or estimation methods; - up-to-date case studies which address the application of such models to socio-economic data; - critical review papers with substantive insights on definition, estimation, and inference for the models of interest.

We are enthusiastic of the opportunity offered by the special issue to disseminate LV models in the scientific community, not only among statisticians. Authors who are not sure whether their problems and ideas fall under the call for paper may preliminarily contact the Editors with an initial draft of the paper.

All submitted papers under this call will undergo the standard review process of the journal. The deadline for the present call is November 30th, 2014.

The special issue is handled through the website of the Journal; the editing and the review process will be handled by the Special Issue Editors Marco Alfó (Sapienza, University of Rome, email:marco.alfo@uniroma1.it) and Francesco Bartolucci (University of Perugia, IT, email: bart@stat.unipg.it).

Please submit your manuscript at http://www.editorialmanager.com/tron/

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