Traditional approaches to analyzing brain anatomy focus on attempting to localize the brain regions associated with a given covariate. Particularly in the study of disease or in drug development it is useful to be able to state that a given disease or drug has an effect on brain anatomy at a specific location. In this document we’re going to evaluate simple hierarchical models and a novel model termed the effect diffusion tree at identifying where in the brain effects are occurring.

Code and data available at github.com/stan-dev/stancon_talks