Latent Markov and growth mixture models: a comparison

We compare two alternative approaches of modeling longitudinal data in order to find patterns of change according to the available covariates, accounting for the unobserved heterogeneity in the population of interest. We refer to the Latent Markov (LM) model and to the Growth Mixture Model (GMM). We illustrate the main results by using real data on the self-perceived health status.