A High-Dimensional Item Response Model for Psychometric-Neuroimaging Association Studies

2820 

Contributed Abstract 

Paper 

Xiaohang Mei (1)

(1) University of Kansas Medical Center, Kansas City, Kansas

Xiaohan Mei  
University of Kansas Medical Center

Xiaohan Mei  
N/A

Neuroimaging data are increasingly used in evaluating cognitive patterns underlying psychometric measurements. Challenges in such analysis include: 1. Latent cognitive traits are not directly observable. 2. Neuroimaging data are high dimensional. To address these issues, we propose a novel high-dimensional item response model. Unlike conventional item response models that model the latent trait solely based on the observed psychometric measurements, our model associates latent traits to high-dimensional neuroimaging features and filters the important features predictive of the latent traits and outcome measurements. We implemented a high-dimensional EM algorithm, it employs a Metropolis-Hasting resampling mechanism in E-steps to evaluate the latent traits and a regularization regression in M-steps to select predictive features. Through extensive simulations, our approach showed great performance in feature selection and outcome prediction. The method is applied to the National Alzheimer's Coordinating Center psychometric and neuroimaging datasets to learn the association patterns between cognitive abilities and brain regions.

High-dimensional data|Item response model|Metropolis-Hasting algorithm|Neuroimaging|Psychometrics measurements|Variable selection

Section on Statistics in Imaging

Brain Imaging