Maximum likelihood and Bayesian estimation for nonlinear structural equation models

Structural equation modeling (SEM) began at its roots as a method for modeling linear rela-tionships among latent variables. The well-known software for SEM name LISREL (Jöreskog and Sörbom, 1996) stands for “Linear Structural Relations”. But, in many cases, the re-striction to linearity is not adequate or flexible enough to explain the phenomena of interest