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Developers Meeting Notes 5/4/12

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Developers Meeting Notes 5/4/12

At the Developers' Meeting on 5/4/12 we discussed the following:

  • The group discussed the trajectory of the approach they would like to take to add multilevel modeling capabilities to OpenMx. The group will start with adding hierarchical multilevel modeling capabilities before they any cross classified multilevel modeling capabilities.
  • The group discussed progress of the weighted least squares (WLS) implementation for OpenMx. Tim has implemented arbitrary WLS functionality for OpenMx.
  • The group discussed when the refactoring of code changes to accomodate WLS and other fit functions would commence. These code changes will create two new functions mxFit and mxExpection that will work in combination to achieve the functionality of the current function mxObjective. A detailed document describing these changes is being prepared and will eventually be made available to the OpenMx community for comments and critiques.
  • An example c program which employs the csolnp optimizer is checked into the source code repository located at: 'https://openmx.ssri.psu.edu/svn/csolnp/. The next step will be to demonstrate how the optimizer can be employed with a R/OpenMx session.
  • The group had a lengthy discussion on saving/loading a model within OpenMx. One takeaway from the discussion was that the current checkpointing functionality needs to (and will) be augmented with additional features. A summary of the discussion and an oppurtunity to contribute to it can be found here.
  • The group discussed updating the installation script to check what operating system users are employing. If the user is employing Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) then the script will default the installation choice to "sequential" as opposed to the current default "parallel" which causes Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) to crash.
  • Mike Hunter continues to make good progress on the LISREL functionality for OpenMx. He recently had a paper and presentation accepted at an upcoming Psychometrics conference. At least half of the paper/presentation will focus on the modular nature of OpenMx and the ease of adding new objectives (like LISREL) to it. The group hopes this will encourage more OpenMx users to add new objectives as well.