Cross-validation and predictive metrics in psychological research: Do not leave out the leave-one-out.

Abstract

There is growing interest in integrating explanatory and predictive research practices in psychological research. For this integration to be successful, the psychologist's toolkit must incorporate standard procedures that enable a direct estimation of the prediction error, such as cross-validation (CV). Despite their apparent simplicity, CV methods are intricate, and thus it is crucial to adapt them to specific contexts and predictive metrics. This study delves into the performance of different CV methods in estimating the prediction error in the $R^2$ and $\text{MSE}$ metrics in regression analysis, ubiquitous in psychological research. Current approaches, which rely on the 5- or 10-fold rule of thumb or on the squared correlation between predicted and observed values, present limitations when computing the prediction error in the $R^2$ metric, a widely used statistic in the behavioral sciences. We propose the use of an alternative method that overcomes these limitations and enables the computation of the leave-one-out (LOO) in the $R^2$ metric. Through two Monte Carlo simulation studies and the application of CV to the data from the Many Labs Replication Project, we show that the LOO consistently has the best performance. The CV methods discussed in the present study have been implemented in the R package OutR2.