Dr. Francesco Tiezzi gave us a brief introduction to one of the main events coming up at our 2016 annual meeting in Raleigh, NC.  His test piece is shown schematically below.  Here is a compressed folder with the material that Dr. Tiezzi used to execute the multiple linear regression of the dependent variable, Food Security, against the three independent variables:  Gini index (a measure of income/wealth inequality), a country’s food production as field crops, and a country’s food production as animal protein.  This model could be specified using any elementary statistical package, but he specified it in R as a way to introduce us to structural equation modeling (SEM).  A recording of the 1-hour webinar is here.

Path diagram of a simple, three-parameter, linear model specified using R.