latent

1. (forensics) The residue left by a person's finger that can be made visible by a process such as powder dusting; a latent fingerprint.Examples: "Once the latent prints have been visualized by the superglue and powder dusting techniques, they should be photographed again. Then the developed latents need to be lifted and placed on backing cards. The latent cards are documented by putting the case number, date and time of lifting, initials of person processing the evidence, and a sketch indicating the location of the lifted latent print on the back of the lift card, as shown in Photo 6.6."; "Paralegal workers do not argue cases in court, and these crimescene fingerprint gatherers do not compare crime-scene latents to known prints of suspects and present their findings in court."

2. (statistics) An underlying cause that can be inferred from statistical correlations; factor.Examples: "These kinds of latents define the invariant dispositional properties enabling prediction and control of the external environment. Finally, there are the latents that underlie manifestation as relationships of power, as cause to effect, condition to occurrence, or dependent variable to independent variable."; "That is, the observed covariance between indicator y₁ and y₃ would mirror the understandable causal behavior of the corresponding underlying latents."; "If one were to compute the reproduced covariances among the latents of the structural model, they might be different from the covariances obtained between the same number of latents in the measurement model."