The Impact of Inaccurate “Informative” Priors for Growth Parameters in Bayesian Growth Mixture Modeling

Within Bayesian estimation, prior distributions are placed on model parameters and these distributions can take on many different levels of informativeness. Although much of the research conducted within this estimation framework uses what are called diffuse (or noninformative) priors, there are certain models and modeling circumstances where it is more optimal to use what are referred to as informative priors. This study focuses on the latter situation and examines the effects of inaccurate informative priors on the growth parameters within the context of growth mixture modeling. Overall, results indicated that growth mixture modeling is relatively robust to the use of inaccurate mean hyperparameters for the growth parameters, as long as the variance hyperparameters are somewhat large.