8  More Models

Blimp can fit a wide variety of models, and the and the User’s Guide is an excellent resource with dozens of examples.

The table below offers a compact overview of the commands available in Blimp scripts and their usage. For more details, see the User’s Guide.

Command Usage
Variable definition
DATA: name of data file
VARIABLES: names of variables in order, if not in data file
ORDINAL: names of existing binary and ordinal variables
NOMINAL: names of existing nominal variables
COUNT: names of existing count variables
CLUSTERID: names of existing cluster-level identifier variables
WEIGHT: names of existing sampling weight variables
BYGROUP: names of existing grouping variables for subgroup estimation
FIXED: names of existing complete exogenous variables
MISSING: missing value code
Variable creation and manipulation
LATENT: names of new latent variables to be defined
RANDOMEFFECT: names of new latent variables
TRANSFORM: transform or recode existing variables
CENTER: center variables by grand or group mean
Model definition
MODEL: model syntax
SIMPLE: request simple slopes in models with interaction
PARAMETERS: define custom parameters, specify prior distributions
TEST: request Bayesian Wald test or nested model comparison
FCS: run fully conditional specification multiple imputation
Estimation settings
BURN: number of burn-in iterations
ITERATIONS: number of iterations after burn-in, split across chains
CHAINS: number of MCMC chains, default is 2
NIMPS: number of imputations to save, if exporting data
THIN: number of iterations between saved imputations
OPTIONS: options for default priors, exported data, and FCS
OUTPUT: customize output statistics
SAVE: save imputed datasets, parameter estimates, and posterior summaries