Growth Models on SSM Parameters

library(circumplex)

Level: Advanced. Read “Bayesian SSM Analysis” first, because this page summarizes draws with the same tools.

Not yet peer reviewed. The growth-model recipe on SSM coordinates this page teaches is the package’s own proposal. Its authors have not yet published it in a peer-reviewed venue. Read it as a research tool, and state that status when you report results from it.

1. Overview

This vignette fits a growth model to SSM parameters measured at several waves. Section 2, “The question growth modeling answers”, states the question. Section 3, “From repeated measures to a long table”, builds the input with ssm_growth_data(). Section 4, “One joint model, not three separate ones”, writes the model with ssm_growth_formula() and fits it. Section 5, “From fixed effects to $(a(t), d(t))$ with intervals”, carries the uncertainty through ssm_trajectory(). Section 6, “Certification: when $d(t)$ intervals are not interpretable”, and Section 7, “A caution about REML intervals at small samples”, state the limits. Section 8, “The unwrap alternative: angle_unwrap()”, fits a second recipe. Section 9, “Caveats and upgrades”, closes the recipe. Section 10, “The same model in nlme and brms”, shows the two other engines. The Wrap-up lists what the page covered and says that no page follows, and the References list the sources cited.

2. The question growth modeling answers

A single Structural Summary Method (SSM) analysis describes one profile: an elevation $e$ , an amplitude $a$ , and a displacement $d$ . vignette("introduction-to-ssm-analysis") defines these three parameters. Repeated measurements assess the same persons at several waves. With them, a new question opens up: how does the profile change over time? Does the group’s interpersonal style drift toward warmth, one of the directions on the circle? Does its distinctiveness (amplitude) grow or fade?

Displacement is an angle, and angles resist ordinary growth modeling. A trajectory drifting from 350° to 10° has moved 20°, not −340°. A linear model fit directly to raw displacements will get this wrong whenever a trajectory crosses the 0°/360° boundary.

This vignette presents the package’s recommended recipe. The recipe avoids the boundary entirely by modeling growth in the Cartesian coordinates $(x, y)$ . Here $x = a \cos d$ and $y = a \sin d$ place the profile as a point on a plane. These are the same coordinates that the SSM estimator itself uses. At the end, the recipe converts the fitted trajectories back to amplitude and displacement at each time, $(a(t), d(t))$ , with circular-correct summaries.

The division of labor is deliberate and mirrors the package’s Bayesian vignette: circumplex does not fit mixed models. It builds the input on the way in, with ssm_growth_data() and ssm_growth_formula(). It turns the fitted model’s estimates into a trajectory on the way out, with ssm_trajectory(). The growth model itself belongs to a dedicated mixed-modeling package. The reference recipe below uses glmmTMB. Section 10 shows the same model in nlme, which ships with R, and in brms.

3. From repeated measures to a long table

The input to the growth model is a long table with one row per person, wave and coordinate. ssm_growth_data() builds it. It scores each input row as its own profile through ssm_parameters_id(). Then it stacks the three coordinates $(e, x, y)$ under an outcome indicator dv.

The package ships a simulated data set, simulated_growth, with five waves (0 to 4) of octant scores for 150 persons. Octant scores are scores on eight scales placed 45° apart around the circle. The data frame has one row per person per wave, with columns person, wave and the eight PANO() scales. The group-level displacement drifts from 350° to 10°, deliberately crossing the 0°/360° boundary. The group-level amplitude stays near 0.6 throughout. ?simulated_growth states how the data were simulated.

data("simulated_growth")
long <- ssm_growth_data(
  simulated_growth,
  scales = PANO(),
  id = "person",
  time = "wave"
)
head(long, 6)
#>   person wave dv      value
#> 1      1    0  e  0.4595363
#> 2      1    0  x  0.5697631
#> 3      1    0  y -0.1920113
#> 4      2    0  e  0.8644617
#> 5      2    0  x  0.9896316
#> 6      2    0  y  0.2426116

The table has four columns. person is a factor and wave is numeric, both copied from the input. dv is a factor with levels e, x and y, and it names the coordinate each row holds. value is that coordinate’s value. One input row gives three output rows, in that order, so the six rows above are the first two persons at wave 0. The table carries no amplitude and no displacement, because growth in displacement is modeled through $x$ and $y$ and never through the angle itself.

4. One joint model, not three separate ones

The growth model treats the three coordinates as a multivariate outcome. Each coordinate gets its own intercept and its own slope on wave. Each person gets a random intercept per coordinate, and the three person intercepts are correlated across outcomes. Each coordinate keeps its own residual variance. ssm_growth_formula() writes this one model in the engine’s dialect, and printing it shows the complete fit call:

f_glmmTMB <- ssm_growth_formula("glmmTMB", time = "wave", id = "person")
f_glmmTMB
#> Joint growth model on SSM coordinates, glmmTMB dialect.
#> Fit on the long table from ssm_growth_data(), then keep the fixed effects:
#> 
#> fit <- glmmTMB::glmmTMB(
#>   value ~ 0 + dv + dv:wave + us(0 + dv | person),
#>   dispformula = ~ 0 + dv,
#>   data = long,
#>   REML = TRUE
#> )
#> coef <- glmmTMB::fixef(fit)$cond
#> vcov <- as.matrix(vcov(fit)$cond)

The time and id arguments are the column names given to ssm_growth_data(). In ssm_growth_formula() they default to "wave" and "person". The object holds the two formulas as f_glmmTMB$formula and f_glmmTMB$dispformula. The fit below is the printed call, with the two formulas read from the object. The model has no options, because a covariate or a quadratic time term changes the model whose interval coverage the package validated.

fit <- glmmTMB::glmmTMB(
  f_glmmTMB$formula,
  dispformula = f_glmmTMB$dispformula,
  data = long,
  REML = TRUE
)
coef <- glmmTMB::fixef(fit)$cond
vcov <- as.matrix(vcov(fit)$cond)
coef
#>           dve           dvx           dvy      dve:wave      dvx:wave 
#>  0.5249198595  0.6085429795 -0.1036244260 -0.0007414075 -0.0010567782 
#>      dvy:wave 
#>  0.0649480442

The last two lines are the ones the printed call ends with. coef holds the fixed effects, the group intercepts and slopes, and vcov holds their covariance matrix. Both go to the next step.

The person block of the variance components is one place where the fit shows that it is joint. Its three standard deviations say how much the persons’ stable shifts in $e$ , $x$ , and $y$ vary. Its three correlations tie those shifts together across the coordinates, and three separate fits could not estimate them. The residual row shows NA because the per-coordinate residual variances live in the dispersion model, not in this table.

glmmTMB::VarCorr(fit)
#> 
#> Conditional model:
#>  Groups   Name Std.Dev. Corr          
#>  person   dve  0.29987                
#>           dvx  0.16637  -0.222        
#>           dvy  0.16763   0.039 -0.032 
#>  Residual           NA

Why joint? The displacement $d(t)$ is derived from the estimated mean coordinates at time $t$ , $\hat{x}(t)$ and $\hat{y}(t)$ , together. So its uncertainty depends on their joint sampling distribution, including the covariance $\mathrm{Cov}(\hat{x}(t), \hat{y}(t))$ .

A tempting shortcut is to fit two (or three) univariate mixed models instead. It produces valid-looking output and wrong $d(t)$ intervals. Separate fits have independent covariance matrices, one per coordinate. Neither matrix holds the covariance between $\hat{x}(t)$ and $\hat{y}(t)$ . So combining them silently sets $\mathrm{Cov}(\hat{x}(t), \hat{y}(t)) = 0$ .

The $x$ and $y$ person effects are each person’s stable shifts in $x$ and $y$ . Our validation simulations included a design with strongly correlated $x$ – $y$ person effects. In that design, the shortcut’s pointwise $d(t)$ coverage drops from the nominal 95% to roughly 86%. Pointwise coverage is how often the interval at one wave contains the true direction. The joint recipe stays at nominal. Strongly correlated person effects are realistic, because profile tilts are rarely aligned with an axis. Do not fit the coordinates separately. Section 5 shows how ssm_trajectory() refuses a covariance matrix assembled from separate fits.

5. From fixed effects to $(a(t), d(t))$ with intervals

ssm_trajectory() takes coef, vcov and the times at which to evaluate the trajectory. It returns one row per time:

trajectory <- ssm_trajectory(coef, vcov, times = 0:4)
trajectory
#> 
#> # SSM Trajectory:
#> 
#>  wave e_est e_lci e_uci x_est x_lci x_uci y_est y_lci y_uci a_est a_lci
#>     0  0.53  0.47  0.58  0.61  0.57  0.65 -0.10 -0.14 -0.07  0.62  0.58
#>     1  0.52  0.47  0.57  0.61  0.57  0.64 -0.04 -0.07 -0.01  0.61  0.58
#>     2  0.52  0.47  0.57  0.61  0.58  0.64  0.03 -0.01  0.06  0.61  0.58
#>     3  0.52  0.47  0.57  0.61  0.57  0.64  0.09  0.06  0.12  0.61  0.58
#>     4  0.52  0.47  0.57  0.60  0.57  0.64  0.16  0.12  0.19  0.62  0.59
#>  a_uci  d_est  d_lci  d_uci
#>   0.66 350.30 346.93 353.69
#>   0.64 356.33 353.24 359.28
#>   0.64   2.46 359.52   5.18
#>   0.64   8.55   5.48  11.48
#>   0.66  14.48  11.14  17.80
#>   Caution: intervals from a fitted model's fixed-effect covariance condition
#>   on its estimated variance components, and are too narrow at small samples.
#>   See vignette("growth-ssm-analysis"), Section 7.

Three steps run inside the call. Together they carry uncertainty through the nonlinear map from $(x, y)$ to $(a(t), d(t))$ . First, the call draws 4000 coefficient vectors from the multivariate normal distribution with mean coef and covariance vcov. This is the same large-sample (asymptotic) step that the package’s Monte Carlo engine takes. Second, it evaluates each draw at each time. A draw’s coordinate at wave 2 is its intercept plus 2 times its slope. Third, it hands each time’s draws to ssm_draws(). That function applies the package’s circular-statistics machinery (medians and circular means, equal-tailed intervals with correct wrapping at the boundary). The table holds the estimate and interval of $e$ , $x$ , $y$ , $a$ and $d$ at each time, plus the certified verdict that Section 6 explains. Printing rounds the table to two decimals, and it ends with the caution for the coef and vcov shape, which Section 7 explains.

Before the second step, the call makes the check that Section 4 promised. It reads the covariance that vcov implies between $\hat{x}(t)$ and $\hat{y}(t)$ at each time in times. A joint fit estimates that covariance, and it is almost never exactly zero. Separate fits produce one covariance matrix per coordinate, and a full matrix assembled from them block by block implies exactly zero at every time. ssm_trajectory() refuses such a matrix with an error. The check is structural, not a test of size: a covariance that is nonzero, however small, passes. A nonzero covariance does not show that the model is right, because a misspecified joint model passes the check too.

The displacement estimates hug the 0°/360° boundary by design. The estimate is near 350° at wave 0, crosses 0° between waves 1 and 2, and reaches about 14° at wave 4. The intervals wrap correctly rather than spanning “the long way around.”

ssm_plot_trajectory() plots the object directly, and it reads the name of the time column from the object. A plain data frame with the same columns plots too, with time = "wave" named:

ssm_plot_trajectory(trajectory)

plot of chunk plot

The displacement panel is drawn on an unwrapped branch. An unwrapped branch lets angles go past 360° (or below 0°) so that the line stays continuous. So the trajectory crosses the boundary as one continuous path instead of jumping a full turn. Values there may legitimately fall outside $[0°, 360°)$ . Each interval is placed on its estimate’s branch and keeps the width it was reported with. This holds even for an interval that straddles the boundary, which is stored with d_lci > d_uci. It is stored that way because each bound is wrapped onto the circle on its own.

Placing the intervals by hand is easy to get subtly wrong. The natural recipe is to “shift each bound by its signed distance from the estimate.” That recipe silently cannot represent an interval wider than a half-turn. Such an interval is exactly the near-origin case that Section 6 is about. ssm_plot_trajectory() handles both cases: the interval that straddles the boundary and the interval wider than a half-turn.

6. Certification: when $d(t)$ intervals are not interpretable

A direction is only meaningful when the trajectory is far enough from the origin of the $(x, y)$ plane. As $a(t) \to 0$ , the draws of $d(t)$ become diffuse or bimodal. A quantile interval of them is then not a trustworthy statement about direction.

At each time, ssm_draws() applies the package’s certification rule to the amplitude interval. The rule requires the interval’s lower bound to be at least 0.35 times the interval’s width. The rule is scale-free: it does not depend on the units of the scores. ssm_trajectory() carries the verdict into its certified column. At any uncertified time, the $d(t)$ interval is not interpretable. It should be reported as such, not narrated as a direction.

Every wave in our worked example is certified. Here is a trajectory where that fails: the group crosses near the origin mid-study (its $x$ coordinate changes sign while $y$ stays near zero). The package ships these data too, as simulated_growth_origin. It has the same persons, waves and columns as simulated_growth, and ?simulated_growth describes both. The calls are the same, and the fit reads the same two formulas:

data("simulated_growth_origin")
long2 <- ssm_growth_data(
  simulated_growth_origin,
  scales = PANO(),
  id = "person",
  time = "wave"
)

fit2 <- glmmTMB::glmmTMB(
  f_glmmTMB$formula,
  dispformula = f_glmmTMB$dispformula,
  data = long2,
  REML = TRUE
)
coef2 <- glmmTMB::fixef(fit2)$cond
vcov2 <- as.matrix(vcov(fit2)$cond)

trajectory2 <- ssm_trajectory(coef2, vcov2, times = 0:4)
trajectory2
#> 
#> # SSM Trajectory:
#> 
#>   wave e_est e_lci e_uci x_est x_lci x_uci y_est y_lci y_uci a_est a_lci
#>      0  0.51  0.45  0.56  0.50  0.46  0.53  0.02 -0.02  0.05  0.50  0.46
#>      1  0.51  0.46  0.56  0.25  0.22  0.28  0.02 -0.01  0.04  0.25  0.22
#> *    2  0.51  0.46  0.56  0.00 -0.03  0.03  0.02 -0.01  0.04  0.02  0.00
#>      3  0.52  0.47  0.57 -0.24 -0.27 -0.21  0.02 -0.01  0.05  0.24  0.21
#>      4  0.52  0.47  0.57 -0.49 -0.53 -0.45  0.02 -0.02  0.05  0.49  0.45
#>   a_uci  d_est  d_lci  d_uci
#>    0.53   1.83 357.91   5.68
#>    0.28   3.72 357.01  10.26
#> *  0.05  80.71 322.34 214.10
#>    0.28 175.95 168.80 182.83
#>    0.53 177.94 173.83 181.97
#>   * Uncertified: the amplitude interval's lower bound is under 0.35
#>   interval-widths above zero, so the displacement interval at that time is
#>   not interpretable.
#>   Caution: intervals from a fitted model's fixed-effect covariance condition
#>   on its estimated variance components, and are too narrow at small samples.
#>   See vignette("growth-ssm-analysis"), Section 7.

The asterisk marks the uncertified row, and the note under the table states the rule. At that wave, the amplitude interval sits too close to zero. The displacement interval, which here spans more than half the circle, is not a statement about direction. In our validation simulations of this near-origin case, the uncertified mark appears at the degraded wave in essentially every replicate. Meanwhile, the waves far from the origin remain certified, and their intervals keep their nominal coverage.

The plot marks the verdict itself:

ssm_plot_trajectory(trajectory2)

plot of chunk lowamp-plot

Uncertified waves are drawn as hollow points on the displacement panel. Read them as gaps in the argument, not as estimates with wide intervals. The amplitude panel shows why: its interval collapses toward zero as the group passes the origin. The displacement interval at such a wave can cover most of the circle. The panel draws it at that full width rather than flattening it into something that looks precise.

The line segments on either side of the hollow point are drawn dashed. A dashed segment touches a wave whose displacement is not interpretable, so the direction of change along it is not to be read. Here the solid line would have shown the group rotating smoothly through about 80° at wave 2. The data cannot support that reading: at wave 2 the group sits so close to the origin that its amplitude interval reaches zero, and the direction there is not established. The dashed segments are kept rather than cut, so the reader can still see that the unwrapped branch carries 0° across to 180° rather than back to −180°. The legend shows the two marks together: a filled point on a solid line where the displacement is interpretable, and a hollow point on a dashed line where it is not.

The certified column is optional for a plain data frame. A table without it plots the same way, minus the hollow marking, the dashed segments and their legend. The figure then makes no claim about interpretability either way. That is the honest default when the verdict was never computed.

7. A caution about REML intervals at small samples

The model is fit by REML (restricted maximum likelihood). Its variance components are the variances and covariances of the random effects and the residuals. The fixed-effect covariance matrix used for the draws conditions on the estimated variance components. That is, it ignores their uncertainty. At small sample sizes, this makes the resulting intervals anticonservative (too narrow). This is a property of the mixed-model machinery, not of the SSM transform. The caution under the Section 5 table states this for the coef and vcov shape.

The package’s coverage oracle ran this model with the glmmTMB REML fit at 200 persons in each coverage cell. The $d(t)$ intervals held coverage between .93 and .97 at every certified wave. At the uncertified low-amplitude wave the coverage was .854, which is the case the certification of Section 6 flags. This page’s sample has 150 persons. The oracle record is devel/m27-coverage-oracle.md, with its per-wave results in devel/m27-coverage-results.rds, in the package’s GitHub repository. The devel directory is not part of the CRAN build.

The package ships no small-sample correction. A percentile parametric bootstrap of the fixed effects is not one on complete balanced data such as this page’s. There every refit’s fixed effects equal ordinary least squares, whatever variance components the refit estimates. So the replicates follow the same normal distribution the helper draws from, up to simulation error. Under coef and vcov the helper draws from a normal distribution on the covariance matrix alone. So no $t$ quantile or denominator degrees of freedom enters it. At samples much smaller than the oracle’s, read the intervals as approximate.

A matrix of coefficient draws from any source enters the helper as draws =, one row per draw, with columns named for the six coefficients. A b_ prefix is dropped. The caution printed under draws says that the intervals summarize those draws as given. Section 10 shows this with posterior draws from brms.

8. The unwrap alternative: `angle_unwrap()`

There is a second documented recipe. Compute each person’s displacement at each wave. Unwrap each person’s sequence onto a continuous branch. Then fit an ordinary univariate growth model to the unwrapped angles.

# One person's displacement over five waves, drifting across the boundary
d_person <- c(350, 355, 2, 8, 12)
angle_unwrap(d_person)
#> [1] 350 355 362 368 372

angle_unwrap() wraps its input into [0°, 360°). Then it accumulates the shortest signed rotation between successive waves: it adds up each wave-to-wave change, taking the shorter way around the circle. By the package’s half-turn convention, an exact 180° step ascends (it counts as +180°). An NA makes the branch of every later wave ambiguous, so NA propagates onward. The unwrapped values live on an ordinary line, so any univariate mixed model applies. This framing models the mean of the person-level directions. That is a legitimate (and different) estimand, or target of estimation, from the direction of the mean trajectory in Section 5.

Its failure modes are sharp, though, and they are the reason the $(x, y)$ recipe is the reference:

Fast movement between waves. Unwrapping assumes successive waves move less than a half-turn. A trajectory sampled too sparsely is unwrapped onto the wrong branch with no warning. So is a person who genuinely swings more than 180° between waves. Near-180° jumps are resolved by convention, not by information the data contain.
No common branch across persons. Suppose persons occupy genuinely heterogeneous locations around the circle (e.g., half the sample near 90°, half near 270°). Then their unwrapped branches are not comparable, and the fixed-effect “mean trajectory” averages numbers that do not share a scale. The $(x, y)$ framing has no such requirement.
Low amplitude. Suppose a person’s amplitude is near zero at some wave. Their observed displacement at that wave is mostly noise. One noisy wave can throw the rest of that person’s sequence onto a wrong branch. This is the same reason that the Section 6 certification exists.

The two recipes agree closely in the concentrated, common-branch regime: everyone well away from the origin, trajectories moving slowly, directions clustered. In that regime, our validation simulations find mean trajectory differences well under a degree. So the choice matters exactly when the unwrap recipe’s assumptions are in doubt.

9. Caveats and upgrades

Two statistical facts about the $(x, y)$ recipe deserve explicit statement:

The derived $d(t)$ is the direction of the mean trajectory, not the mean of the person-level directions. These differ whenever persons disperse directionally. Neither is wrong, but they answer different questions. Section 8’s unwrap recipe targets the latter.
The derived $a(t)$ shrinks toward zero under directional dispersion. The amplitude of an average profile is smaller than the average of individual amplitudes whenever persons point in different directions. This is the standard SSM aggregation fact, and the growth setting inherits it intact.

Finally, the multivariate normal (MVN) draw propagation used here is a large-sample approximation. Draw propagation is the Section 5 method of carrying uncertainty through random draws. It is defensible in the concentrated regime (Section 8). Outside that regime, the Section 6 certification guards it. The fully model-based upgrade is projected-normal regression, a regression model for angle outcomes. The bpnreg package is one implementation. The method models circular outcomes directly with person-level structure and gives exact posterior inference for $d(t)$ . circumplex has no function that fits it. But ssm_draws() will happily summarize posterior draws produced by any such model.

10. The same model in nlme and brms

ssm_growth_formula() writes the same joint model for two other engines. Each dialect fits the same three intercepts and slopes, the same correlated person intercepts and a separate residual variance for each coordinate.

nlme ships with every R installation. Its call sets na.action = na.omit, because nlme::lme() otherwise stops on a row whose value is NA. glmmTMB drops such a row by default. The nlme fixed effects and their covariance go to ssm_trajectory() exactly as glmmTMB’s do. On the data of Section 3, the two engines’ fixed effects and covariance agree within the bounds the package’s nlme parity test holds:

ssm_growth_formula("nlme", time = "wave", id = "person")
#> Joint growth model on SSM coordinates, nlme dialect.
#> Fit on the long table from ssm_growth_data(), then keep the fixed effects:
#> 
#> fit <- nlme::lme(
#>   fixed = value ~ 0 + dv + dv:wave,
#>   random = ~ 0 + dv | person,
#>   weights = nlme::varIdent(form = ~ 1 | dv),
#>   data = long,
#>   na.action = na.omit,
#>   method = "REML"
#> )
#> coef <- nlme::fixef(fit)
#> vcov <- as.matrix(vcov(fit))

brms fits the same likelihood by Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling under its default priors. brms needs a Stan toolchain, so this page does not run it, and the fit chunk below is shown and not evaluated. The call is the one ssm_growth_formula("brms") prints, with the sampler settings added:

f_brms <- ssm_growth_formula("brms", time = "wave", id = "person")
f_brms
#> Joint growth model on SSM coordinates, brms dialect.
#> Fit on the long table from ssm_growth_data(), then keep the draws:
#> 
#> fit <- brms::brm(
#>   brms::bf(
#>     value ~ 0 + dv + dv:wave + (0 + dv | person),
#>     sigma ~ 0 + dv
#>   ),
#>   data = long
#> )
#> draws <- as.matrix(fit)

bfit <- brms::brm(
  brms::bf(f_brms$formula, f_brms$sigma),
  data = long,
  chains = 4, iter = 2000, cores = 4, seed = 20260716
)
draws <- as.matrix(bfit)

The vignette ships the six fixed-effect columns of those draws as growth_brms_draws.rds, written once by that call under that seed. The page reads the file, which has one row per posterior draw:

draws <- readRDS("growth_brms_draws.rds")
dim(draws)
#> [1] 4000    6

ssm_trajectory() takes the matrix as draws in place of coef and vcov. It drops the b_ prefix from the column names, it ignores every other column a full as.matrix(bfit) carries, and it draws nothing new. Its second and third steps run on the posterior draws as given:

ssm_trajectory(times = 0:4, draws = draws)
#> 
#> # SSM Trajectory:
#> 
#>  wave e_est e_lci e_uci x_est x_lci x_uci y_est y_lci y_uci a_est a_lci
#>     0  0.53  0.48  0.58  0.61  0.57  0.65 -0.10 -0.14 -0.07  0.62  0.58
#>     1  0.53  0.48  0.58  0.61  0.57  0.64 -0.04 -0.07 -0.01  0.61  0.58
#>     2  0.53  0.48  0.57  0.61  0.58  0.64  0.03  0.00  0.06  0.61  0.58
#>     3  0.52  0.48  0.57  0.61  0.57  0.64  0.09  0.06  0.12  0.61  0.58
#>     4  0.52  0.48  0.57  0.60  0.57  0.64  0.16  0.12  0.19  0.62  0.59
#>  a_uci  d_est  d_lci  d_uci
#>   0.65 350.33 346.92 353.86
#>   0.64 356.36 353.39 359.47
#>   0.64   2.49 359.66   5.49
#>   0.65   8.59   5.56  11.73
#>   0.66  14.51  11.12  17.91
#>   Caution: these intervals summarize the supplied draws as given. Their
#>   coverage depends on how the draws were produced, and the joint fit was not
#>   checked. See vignette("growth-ssm-analysis"), Sections 7 and 10.

At each wave, the posterior medians of $x$ and $y$ sit within 0.01 of the glmmTMB table’s estimates. The caution under the table is the one for the draws shape: the intervals summarize the draws as given. Posterior draws average over the variance components rather than condition on their estimates, so the REML caution of Section 7 does not apply to them. A posterior interval from brms depends on its priors instead, and the package’s coverage validation ran the REML fit, not the brms fit. The draws shape is not checked for a joint fit, so the joint model is the user’s responsibility there.

Wrap-up

A growth model on the $(e, x, y)$ coordinates describes how a group’s mean profile moves over time. ssm_growth_data() builds the long input table, ssm_growth_formula() hands over the joint model’s fit call, and one mixed-model engine fits the three coordinates together. ssm_trajectory() turns the fixed effects, or posterior draws, into $a(t)$ and $d(t)$ with intervals, and ssm_plot_trajectory() draws them. The certification step says when a direction interval is not interpretable. angle_unwrap() is the alternative when person-level directions are the target. No page follows this one. To draw the fitted trajectories across occasions on the circumplex canvas, read “Advanced Circumplex Visualization”.

References

Girard, J. M., Zimmermann, J., & Wright, A. G. C. (2018). New tools for circumplex data analysis and visualization in R. Assessment, 25(1), 3–20.
Zimmermann, J., & Wright, A. G. C. (2017). Beyond description in interpersonal construct validation: Methodological advances in the circumplex Structural Summary Approach. Assessment, 24(1), 3–23.
Cremers, J., & Klugkist, I. (2018). One direction? A tutorial for circular data analysis using R with examples in cognitive psychology. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 2040.