The paper investigates the problem of determining patterns of criminal behaviour from official criminal histories, concentrating on the variety and type of offending convictions. The analysis is carried out on the basis of a multivariate latent Markov model which allows for discrete covariates...

type="main" xml:id="rssc12030-abs-0001" <title type="main">Summary</title> <p>Motivated by an application to a longitudinal data set coming from the Health and Retirement Study about self-reported health status, we propose a model for longitudinal data which is based on a latent process to account for the unobserved...</p>

Following Cox & Wermuth (1994, 2002), we show that the distribution of a set of binary observable variables, induced by a certain discrete latent variable model, may be approximated by a quadratic exponential distribution. This discrete latent variable model is equivalent to the latent-class...