Recursive partitioning methods have become popular and widely used tools for nonparametric regression and classification in many scientific fields. Especially random forests, which can deal with large numbers of predictor variables even in the presence of complex interactions, have been applied successfully in genetics, clinical medicine, and…

The article uses confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) as a template to explain didactically multilevel structural equation models (ML-SEM) and to demonstrate the equivalence of general mixed-effects models and ML-SEM. An intuitively appealing graphical representation of complex ML-SEMs is introduced that succinctly describes the underlying model and…