The book, belonging to the series “Studies in Theoretical and Applied Statistics – Selected Papers from the Statistical Societies”, presents a peer-reviewed selection of contributions on relevant topics organized by the editors on the occasion of the SIS 2013 Statistical Conference "Advances in Latent Variables. Methods, Models and Applications", held at the Department of Economics and Management of the University of Brescia from June 19 to 21, 2013.

The focus of the book is on advances in statistical methods for analyses with latent variables. In fact, in recent years, there has been increasing interest in this broad research area from both a theoretical and an applied point of view, as the statistical latent variable approach allows the effective modeling of complex real-life phenomena in a wide range of research fields.

A major goal of the volume is to bring together articles written by statisticians from different research fields, which present different approaches and experiences related to the analysis of unobservable variables and the study of the relationships between them.