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Definition Variables #277
Description
Does the package support definition variables as in OpenMx? If not, I strongly vote for including this in both the package and Stenograph.
If this is not yet, implemented, it should either just be a symbol within fixed(...) which is then interpreted as a column name from which the data is read out, or it could be a new modifier defvar(...) that takes a symbol as input.
Activity
brandmaier commentedon Jun 1, 2026
I just want to bump this issue up because I find it important, @aaronpeikert
I believe that definition variables are easy to add in StructuralEquationModels.jl but I understand that StenoGraph.jl needs a generic way to specify them, which may be harder to come up with.
For definition variables, we need a simple wrapper that takes a Symbol corresponding to a variable name (e.g. escaped by
defvar(...)in a dataset, then create a multi-group model, in which each person have their own model, all parameters are set to equality across model and the definition variable is set to fixed at a value that the model has to get from the dataset. This should be relatively easy, right?aaronpeikert commentedon Jun 1, 2026
From stenographs point of view definition variables are normal nodes with some modifier indicating they are definition variables so this should be trivial!