Support Environment for Grade of Membership (GOM) Model

Grade of Membership (GoM) is a multivariate analytic technique for analyzing high dimensionaldiscrete response data with very general distributional assumptions. GoM has been developed as aresearch tool at Duke University over the last 10 years with efforts focused on developing and assessingthe statistical foundations of GoM. Little effort has been directed to producing a fully documentedversion of GoM. Thus, various versions of GoM exist with different capabilities. The first project taskwill be to identify an appropriate research version of the GoM which will be enhanced and documentedfor distribution to NIA and NIH researchers. The GoM version will be capable of handling datasets withsizes on the order of 10,000 observations and 30 analytic variables and will minimally operate onworkstations and 486-based PCs. Such a version of GoM would be capable of analyzing many of thenational survey datasets including the National Long Term Care Surveys. An intelligent supportenvironment for the GoM model will also assist researchers in applying GoM. The support environmentwill include three modules: Question and Answers (Q&A), Data Preparation, and Report Analysis. Wewill develop a prototype environment and a DOS version of GoM for Phase I.