On the estimation of parameters in latent structure analysis

In this note, we describe the iterative procedure introduced earlier by Goodman to calculate the maximum likelihood estimates of the parameters in latent structure analysis, and we provide here a simple and direct proof of the fact that the parameter estimates obtained with the iterative procedure cannot lie outside the allowed interval. Formann recently stated that Goodman's algorithm can yield parameter estimates that lie outside the allowed interval, and we prove in the present note that Formann's contention is incorrect.This research was supported in part by Research Contract No. NSF SOC 76-80389 from the Division of the Social Sciences of the National Science Foundation. The author is indebted to C. C. Clogg for helpful comments and for the numerical results reported here (see, e.g., Table 1).