"Preface. Latent Markov models represent an important class of latent variable models for the analysis of longitudinal data, when the response variables measure common characteristics of interest which are not directly observable. Typically, the response variables are categorical, even if...

We review the discrete latent variable approach, which is very popular in statistics and related fields. It allows us to formulate interpretable and flexible models that can be used to analyze complex datasets in the presence of articulated dependence structures among variables. Specific models...