What are common uses of LCA?
The most common use of LCA is to discover case subtypes (or confirm hypothesized subtypes) based on multivariate categorical data. LCA is well suited to many health applications where one wishes to identify disease subtypes or diagnostic subcategories. Other common areas of application include marketing research, survey research, sociology, psychology, and education. Another more-or-less distinctly medical LCA application is evaluation of diagnostic tests in the absence of a “gold standard.” For example, if one has several tests for detecting presence/absence of a disease, but no comparison “gold standard” that indicates disease status with certainty, LCA can be used to provide estimates of diagnostic accuracy (sensitivity, specificity, proportion of correct diagnoses, etc.) of the different tests. LCA may also serve simply as a convenient data-reduction tool.
