sparseSEM (Q44953)

Provides elastic net penalized maximum likelihood estimator for structural equation models (SEM). The package implements 'lasso' and 'elastic net' (l1/l2) penalized SEM and estimates the model parameters with an efficient block coordinate ascent algorithm that maximizes the penalized likelihood of the SEM. Hyperparameters are inferred from cross-validation (CV). A Stability Selection (STS) function is also available to provide accurate causal effect selection. The software achieves high accuracy performance through a 'Network Generative Pre-trained Transformer' (Network GPT) Framework with two steps: 1) pre-trains the model to generate a complete (fully connected) graph; and 2) uses the complete graph as the initial state to fit the 'elastic net' penalized SEM.