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A Note on Ising Network Analysis with Missing Data

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2025

Siliang Zhang
Affiliation:
East China Normal University
Yunxiao Chen*
Affiliation:
London School of Economics and Political Science
*
Correspondence should be made to Yunxiao Chen, Department of Statistics, London School of Economics and Political Science, Room 5.16 Columbia House, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, UK. Email: y.chen186@lse.ac.uk
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Abstract

The Ising model has become a popular psychometric model for analyzing item response data. The statistical inference of the Ising model is typically carried out via a pseudo-likelihood, as the standard likelihood approach suffers from a high computational cost when there are many variables (i.e., items). Unfortunately, the presence of missing values can hinder the use of pseudo-likelihood, and a listwise deletion approach for missing data treatment may introduce a substantial bias into the estimation and sometimes yield misleading interpretations. This paper proposes a conditional Bayesian framework for Ising network analysis with missing data, which integrates a pseudo-likelihood approach with iterative data imputation. An asymptotic theory is established for the method. Furthermore, a computationally efficient Pólya–Gamma data augmentation procedure is proposed to streamline the sampling of model parameters. The method’s performance is shown through simulations and a real-world application to data on major depressive and generalized anxiety disorders from the National Epidemiological Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions (NESARC).

Information

Type
Theory and Methods
Creative Commons
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Copyright
© 2024 The Author(s)
Figure 0

Figure 1 Flowchart of the updating rule for the proposed method.

Figure 1

Algorithm 1 Ising Network Analysis with Iterative Imputation

Figure 2

Figure 2 a Boxplots of MSEs for edge parameters sjl\documentclass[12pt]{minimal}\usepackage{amsmath}\usepackage{wasysym}\usepackage{amsfonts}\usepackage{amssymb}\usepackage{amsbsy}\usepackage{mathrsfs}\usepackage{upgreek}\setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt}\begin{document}$$s_{jl}$$\end{document}. b Boxplots of MSEs for intercept parameters sjj\documentclass[12pt]{minimal}\usepackage{amsmath}\usepackage{wasysym}\usepackage{amsfonts}\usepackage{amssymb}\usepackage{amsbsy}\usepackage{mathrsfs}\usepackage{upgreek}\setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt}\begin{document}$$s_{jj}$$\end{document}.

Figure 3

Table 1 MSEs and biases for edge parameters.

Figure 4

Table 2 Descriptions of MDD and GAD items and their missing rates.

Figure 5

Figure 3 Estimated network structure for MDD and GAD. a Complete-case analysis. b Proposed method.