the optimal number of latent class in lclogit2

[Jae-hyung Park]

Dear statalist,

I faced the following problem the lowest BIC and the lowest CAIC are different in choosing the optimal number of latent classes in lclogit2.

no. of latent classes	BIC	CAIC
2	2833.681	2853.681
3	2839.616	2871.616
4	2821.531	2865.531
5	2841.433	2897.433

Which criteria will be the better for me to follow?

Any help would be appreciated.

[Hong Il Yoo]

Jae-hyung Park: There's no hard and fast rule to handle cases like this. One approach is to report the more general BIC-optimal model in the main paper and report the CAIC-optimal model in the Appendix, and comment on their differences in the main paper. Alternatively you may choose to report the CAIC-optimal model in the main paper and the BIC-optimal model in the appendix instead, if it happens to be the case that the more parsimonious model leads to broadly the same conclusions.

[Jae-hyung Park]

Dear Professor Hong il Yoo,

Thank you for your prompt and kind comment.
Nowadays I learned that not only knowledge about various theories but also skills in statistical software are essential to researchers.