Regularized Mixture Rasch Model

Abstract

The mixture Rasch model is a popular mixture model for analyzing multivariate binary data. The drawback of this model is that the number of estimated parameters substantially increases with an increasing number of latent classes, which, in turn, hinders the interpretability of model parameters. This article proposes regularized estimation of the mixture Rasch model that imposes some sparsity structure on class-specific item difficulties. We illustrate the feasibility of the proposed modeling approach by means of one simulation study and two simulated case studies.