13th December, 2018

Context

  • Theory:

    1. Like Phlogiston, fairies and witches, latent variables need to be abandoned
    2. Psychological disorders are a 'network' of causally interacting symptoms (Borsboom, 2017)



  • Practice:

    1. Estimate statistical models such as the Gaussian graphical model on cross-sectional data
    2. Visualize the network
    3. Compute so-called centrality measures for each node
    4. Interpret high scoring nodes as important, suggest them as intervention targets

Context

  • Examples:

    • Stochl et al. (2018) studied well-being and find that 3 items are consistently the most central items
    • McNally et al. (2015) studied earthquake victims suffering PTSD (use the word causal 59 times)