ShortForm (version 0.5.3)
Automatic Short Form Creation
Description
Performs automatic creation of short forms of scales with an
ant colony optimization algorithm and a Tabu search. As implemented in the
package, the ant colony algorithm randomly selects items to build a model of
a specified length, then updates the probability of item selection according
to the fit of the best model within each set of searches. The algorithm
continues until the same items are selected by multiple ants a given number
of times in a row. On the other hand, the Tabu search changes one parameter at
a time to be either free, constrained, or fixed while keeping track of the
changes made and putting changes that result in worse fit in a "tabu" list
so that the algorithm does not revisit them for some number of searches.
See Leite, Huang, & Marcoulides (2008) for
an applied example of the ant colony algorithm, and Marcoulides & Falk (2018)
for an applied example of the Tabu search.