In:
PLOS Computational Biology, Public Library of Science (PLoS), Vol. 17, No. 11 ( 2021-11-18), p. e1009477-
Abstract:
Over the past decade, biomarker discovery has become a key goal in psychiatry to aid in the more reliable diagnosis and prognosis of heterogeneous psychiatric conditions and the development of tailored therapies. Nevertheless, the prevailing statistical approach is still the mean group comparison between “cases” and “controls,” which tends to ignore within-group variability. In this educational article, we used empirical data simulations to investigate how effect size, sample size, and the shape of distributions impact the interpretation of mean group differences for biomarker discovery. We then applied these statistical criteria to evaluate biomarker discovery in one area of psychiatric research—autism research. Across the most influential areas of autism research, effect size estimates ranged from small ( d = 0.21, anatomical structure) to medium ( d = 0.36 electrophysiology, d = 0.5, eye-tracking) to large ( d = 1.1 theory of mind). We show that in normal distributions, this translates to approximately 45% to 63% of cases performing within 1 standard deviation (SD) of the typical range, i.e., they do not have a deficit/atypicality in a statistical sense. For a measure to have diagnostic utility as defined by 80% sensitivity and 80% specificity, Cohen’s d of 1.66 is required, with still 40% of cases falling within 1 SD. However, in both normal and nonnormal distributions, 1 (skewness) or 2 (platykurtic, bimodal) biologically plausible subgroups may exist despite small or even nonsignificant mean group differences. This conclusion drastically contrasts the way mean group differences are frequently reported. Over 95% of studies omitted the “on average” when summarising their findings in their abstracts (“autistic people have deficits in X”), which can be misleading as it implies that the group-level difference applies to all individuals in that group. We outline practical approaches and steps for researchers to explore mean group comparisons for the discovery of stratification biomarkers.
Type of Medium:
Online Resource
ISSN:
1553-7358
DOI:
10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009477
DOI:
10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009477.g001
DOI:
10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009477.g002
DOI:
10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009477.g003
DOI:
10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009477.t001
DOI:
10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009477.t002
DOI:
10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009477.s001
DOI:
10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009477.s002
DOI:
10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009477.s003
DOI:
10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009477.s004
DOI:
10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009477.s005
DOI:
10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009477.s006
DOI:
10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009477.s007
Language:
English
Publisher:
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Publication Date:
2021
detail.hit.zdb_id:
2193340-6
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