The focus of the book is on advances in statistical methods for analyses with latent variables. In fact, in recent years, there has been increasing interest in this broad research area from both a theoretical and an applied point of view, as the statistical latent variable approach allows the effective modeling of complex real-life phenomena in a wide range of research fields.

A major goal of the volume is to bring together articles written by statisticians from different research fields, which present different approaches and experiences related to the analysis of unobservable variables and the study of the relationships between them.