StructuralEquationModels.jl: a Julia Package for Extensible and Efficient Structural Equation Modeling

We introduce StructuralEquationModels.jl, a novel Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) software designed with extensibility as its core principle. Since the introduction of SEM, the range of problems it is applied to is rapidly expanding. However, SEM software implementations did not anticipate such expansion, so software flexibility has become one major factor limiting the adoption of innovations in the field of SEM. StructuralEquationModels.jl is designed to be modular and extensible to remove that bottleneck. This approach not only speeds up innovation in SEM but also ensures the integrity and reliability of existing functionality. We leverage the Julia programming language's ecosystem to achieve efficient implementations of loss functions and gradients and support modern optimization backends. The versatility of StructuralEquationModels.jl is demonstrated on a set of examples (e.g., adding support for regularized SEM) and simulations (e.g., sensitivity of the RMSEA to misspecification of large factor analysis models). Using these simulations as a benchmark, we show that StructuralEquationModels.jl is computationally more efficient than existing SEM implementations.