Flexible Extensions to Structural Equation Models Using Computation Graphs

Structural equation modeling (SEM) is being applied to ever more complex data types and questions, often requiring extensions such as regularization or novel fitting functions. To extend SEM, researchers currently need to completely reformulate SEM and its optimization algorithm – a challenging and time–consuming task. In this paper, we introduce the computation graph for SEM, and show that this approach can extend SEM without the need for...