The GENetic optimization and Bootstrapping of LInear Structures (GENBLIS) Home Page

Walter R. Mebane, Jr. and Jasjeet S. Sekhon
Please direct all questions and comments to Jasjeet Sekhon.

GENBLIS (GENetic optimization and Bootstrapping of LInear Structures) is an evolutionary program which estimates structural equation models with latent variables by combining the global search strength of evolutionary algorithms with the ability of derivative based algorithms to do rapid local hill climbing. GENBLIS provides bootstrap confidence intervals for parameters and bootstrap confidence limits for the goodness-of-fit test statistic. Structural equation models are often used in political science, sociology, psychology, marketing and related social science fields to specify and estimate stochastic models for linear relations in the presence of measurement errors.

There are a variety of ways to parameterize structural equation models. Following Bollen (1989 [*]), GENBLIS uses a parameterization developed by Jöreskog (1973 [*]) and Wiley (1973 [*]). This parameterization has become a standard because of the popularity of the LISREL program which was developed by Jöreskog and Sörbom.

GENBLIS is described in the GENBLIS Manual. One can download the following binaries:

The UNIX binaries are in tar and gzip format. Therefore, to unpack them in a given directory please issue the following commands:

zcat genblis.linux-1.11.4.tar.gz | tar -xvf -

You may have to change the mode of the genblis binary to make it an executable. The can be done by issuing the following command:

chmod ugo+rx genblis

Small parts of the current GENBLIS code were adapted from an early version of Zbigniew Michalewicz's GENOCOP I.

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