Dipartimento di Scienze Statistiche

The identification of different homogeneous groups of observations and their appropriate analysis in PLS-SEM has become a critical issue in many application fields. In this paper, a new methodology for simultaneous non-hierarchical clustering and PLS-SEM is proposed. This methodology is motivated by the fact that the sequential approach of applying first SEM or PLS-SEM and second the clustering algorithm such as K-means on the latent scores of the SEM/PLS-SEM may fail to find the correct clustering structure existing in the data. A simulation study and an application on real data are included to evaluate the performance of the proposed methodology.