
Estimating dependence relationships between variables is a crucial issue in many applied domains and in particular psychology. When several variables are entertained, these can be organized into a network which encodes their set of conditional dependence relations. Typically however, the underlying network structure is completely unknown or can be partially drawn only; accordingly it should be learned from the available data, a process known as structure learning. In addition, data arising from social and psychological studies are often of different types, as they can include categorical, discrete and continuous measurements. In this paper, we develop a novel Bayesian methodology for structure learning of directed networks which applies to mixed data, i.e., possibly containing continuous, discrete, ordinal and binary variables simultaneously. Whenever available, our method can easily incorporate known dependence structures among variables represented by paths or edge directions that can be postulated in advance based on the specific problem under consideration. We evaluate the proposed method through extensive simulation studies, with appreciable performances in comparison with current state-of-the-art alternative methods. Finally, we apply our methodology to well-being data from a social survey promoted by the United Nations, and mental health data collected from a cohort of medical students. R code implementing the proposed methodology is available at https://github.com/FedeCastelletti/bayes_networks_mixed_data.
FOS: Computer and information sciences, Psychometrics, Estimation in multivariate analysis, Bayesian inference, Statistics - Applications, Methodology (stat.ME), Humans, Computer Simulation, Applications (stat.AP), network psychometrics, Statistics - Methodology, Probabilistic graphical models, Models, Statistical, structural equation model, Bayesian inference; directed acyclic graph; Markov chain Monte Carlo; network psychometrics; structural equation model;, Bayes Theorem, Markov chain Monte Carlo, Mental Health, directed acyclic graph, Algorithms, Applications of statistics to psychology
FOS: Computer and information sciences, Psychometrics, Estimation in multivariate analysis, Bayesian inference, Statistics - Applications, Methodology (stat.ME), Humans, Computer Simulation, Applications (stat.AP), network psychometrics, Statistics - Methodology, Probabilistic graphical models, Models, Statistical, structural equation model, Bayesian inference; directed acyclic graph; Markov chain Monte Carlo; network psychometrics; structural equation model;, Bayes Theorem, Markov chain Monte Carlo, Mental Health, directed acyclic graph, Algorithms, Applications of statistics to psychology
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