Growth curve models (GCMs), with their ability to directly investigate within-subject change over time and between-subject differences in change for longitudinal data, are widely used in social and behavioral sciences. While GCMs are typically studied with the normal distribution assumption, empirical data often violate the normality assumption in applications. Failure to account for the deviation from normality in data distribution may lead to unreliable model estimation and misleading statistical inferences. A robust GCM based on conditional medians was recently proposed and outperformed traditional growth curve modeling when outliers are present resulting in nonnormality. However, this robust approach was shown to perform less satisfactorily when leverage observations existed. In this work, we propose a robust double medians growth curve modeling approach (DOME GCM) to thoroughly disentangle the influence of data contamination on model estimation and inferences, where two conditional medians are employed for the distributions of the within-subject measurement errors and of random effects, respectively. Model estimation and inferences are conducted in the Bayesian framework, and Laplace distributions are used to convert the optimization problem of median estimation into a problem of obtaining the maximum likelihood estimator for a transformed model. A Monte Carlo simulation study has been conducted to evaluate the numerical performance of the proposed approach, and showed that the proposed approach yields more accurate and efficient parameter estimates when data contain outliers or leverage observations. The application of the developed robust approach is illustrated using a real dataset from the Virginia Cognitive Aging Project to study the change of memory ability.
{"title":"Disentangling the Influence of Data Contamination in Growth Curve Modeling: A Median Based Bayesian Approach","authors":"Tonghao Zhang, Xin Tong, Jianhui Zhou","doi":"10.35566/jbds/v2n2/p1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.35566/jbds/v2n2/p1","url":null,"abstract":"Growth curve models (GCMs), with their ability to directly investigate within-subject change over time and between-subject differences in change for longitudinal data, are widely used in social and behavioral sciences. While GCMs are typically studied with the normal distribution assumption, empirical data often violate the normality assumption in applications. Failure to account for the deviation from normality in data distribution may lead to unreliable model estimation and misleading statistical inferences. A robust GCM based on conditional medians was recently proposed and outperformed traditional growth curve modeling when outliers are present resulting in nonnormality. However, this robust approach was shown to perform less satisfactorily when leverage observations existed. In this work, we propose a robust double medians growth curve modeling approach (DOME GCM) to thoroughly disentangle the influence of data contamination on model estimation and inferences, where two conditional medians are employed for the distributions of the within-subject measurement errors and of random effects, respectively. Model estimation and inferences are conducted in the Bayesian framework, and Laplace distributions are used to convert the optimization problem of median estimation into a problem of obtaining the maximum likelihood estimator for a transformed model. A Monte Carlo simulation study has been conducted to evaluate the numerical performance of the proposed approach, and showed that the proposed approach yields more accurate and efficient parameter estimates when data contain outliers or leverage observations. The application of the developed robust approach is illustrated using a real dataset from the Virginia Cognitive Aging Project to study the change of memory ability.","PeriodicalId":93575,"journal":{"name":"Journal of behavioral data science","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45691343","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Data fusion approaches have been adopted to facilitate more complex analyses and produce more accurate results. Bayesian Synthesis is a relatively new approach to data fusion where results from the analysis of one dataset are used as prior information for the analysis of the next dataset. Datasets of interest are sequentially analyzed until a final posterior distribution is created, incorporating information from all candidate datasets, rather than simply combining the datasets into one large dataset and analyzing them simultaneously. One concern with this approach lies in the sequence of datasets being fused. This study examines whether the order of datasets matters when the datasets being fused each have substantially different sample sizes. The performance of Bayesian Synthesis with varied sample sizes is evaluated by examining results from simulated data with known population values under a variety of conditions. Results suggest that the order in which the dataset are fused can have a significant impact on the obtained estimates.
{"title":"The Impact of Sample Size on Exchangeability in the Bayesian Synthesis Approach to Data Fusion","authors":"Katerina M. Marcoulides, Jia Quan, Eric Wright","doi":"10.35566/jbds/v2n1/p5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.35566/jbds/v2n1/p5","url":null,"abstract":"Data fusion approaches have been adopted to facilitate more complex analyses and produce more accurate results. Bayesian Synthesis is a relatively new approach to data fusion where results from the analysis of one dataset are used as prior information for the analysis of the next dataset. Datasets of interest are sequentially analyzed until a final posterior distribution is created, incorporating information from all candidate datasets, rather than simply combining the datasets into one large dataset and analyzing them simultaneously. One concern with this approach lies in the sequence of datasets being fused. This study examines whether the order of datasets matters when the datasets being fused each have substantially different sample sizes. The performance of Bayesian Synthesis with varied sample sizes is evaluated by examining results from simulated data with known population values under a variety of conditions. Results suggest that the order in which the dataset are fused can have a significant impact on the obtained estimates.","PeriodicalId":93575,"journal":{"name":"Journal of behavioral data science","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46505755","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This is a brief comparative review of the book An Introduction to Nonparametric Statistics.
这是对《非参数统计导论》一书的简要比较回顾。
{"title":"Book Review: An Introduction to Nonparametric Statistics","authors":"Kévin Allan Sales Rodrigues","doi":"10.35566/jbds/v2n1/p8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.35566/jbds/v2n1/p8","url":null,"abstract":"This is a brief comparative review of the book An Introduction to Nonparametric Statistics.","PeriodicalId":93575,"journal":{"name":"Journal of behavioral data science","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46609117","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
D. Borsboom, T. Blanken, F. Dablander, Frenk van Harreveld, C. Tanis, P. Van Mieghem
The imposition of lockdowns in response to the COVID-19 outbreak has underscored the importance of human behavior in mitigating virus transmission. The scientific study of interventions designed to change behavior (e.g., to promote physical distancing) requires measures of effectiveness that are fast, that can be assessed through experiments, and that can be investigated without actual virus transmission. This paper presents a methodological approach designed to deliver such indicators. We show how behavioral data, obtainable through wearable assessment devices or camera footage, can be used to assess the effect of interventions in experimental research; in addition, the approach can be extended to longitudinal data involving contact tracing apps. Our methodology operates by constructing a contact network: a representation that encodes which individuals have been in physical proximity long enough to transmit the virus. Because behavioral interventions alter the contact network, a comparison of contact networks before and after the intervention can provide information on the effectiveness of the intervention. We coin indicators based on this idea Behavioral Contact Network (BECON) indicators. We examine the performance of three indicators: the Density BECON, based on differences in network density; the Spectral BECON, based on differences in the eigenvector of the adjacency matrix; and the ASPL BECON, based on differences in average shortest path lengths. Using simulations, we show that all three indicators can effectively track the effect of behavioral interventions. Even in conditions with significant amounts of noise, BECON indicators can reliably identify and order effect sizes of interventions. The present paper invites further study of the method as well as practical implementations to test the validity of BECON indicators in real data.
{"title":"The Lighting of the BECONs","authors":"D. Borsboom, T. Blanken, F. Dablander, Frenk van Harreveld, C. Tanis, P. Van Mieghem","doi":"10.35566/jbds/v2n1/p1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.35566/jbds/v2n1/p1","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 \u0000 \u0000The imposition of lockdowns in response to the COVID-19 outbreak has underscored the importance of human behavior in mitigating virus transmission. The scientific study of interventions designed to change behavior (e.g., to promote physical distancing) requires measures of effectiveness that are fast, that can be assessed through experiments, and that can be investigated without actual virus transmission. This paper presents a methodological approach designed to deliver such indicators. We show how behavioral data, obtainable through wearable assessment devices or camera footage, can be used to assess the effect of interventions in experimental research; in addition, the approach can be extended to longitudinal data involving contact tracing apps. Our methodology operates by constructing a contact network: a representation that encodes which individuals have been in physical proximity long enough to transmit the virus. Because behavioral interventions alter the contact network, a comparison of contact networks before and after the intervention can provide information on the effectiveness of the intervention. We coin indicators based on this idea Behavioral Contact Network (BECON) indicators. We examine the performance of three indicators: the Density BECON, based on differences in network density; the Spectral BECON, based on differences in the eigenvector of the adjacency matrix; and the ASPL BECON, based on differences in average shortest path lengths. Using simulations, we show that all three indicators can effectively track the effect of behavioral interventions. Even in conditions with significant amounts of noise, BECON indicators can reliably identify and order effect sizes of interventions. The present paper invites further study of the method as well as practical implementations to test the validity of BECON indicators in real data. \u0000 \u0000 \u0000","PeriodicalId":93575,"journal":{"name":"Journal of behavioral data science","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43762000","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Bayesian approach is becoming increasingly important as it provides many advantages in dealing with complex data. However, there is no well-defined model selection criterion or index in a Bayesian context. To address the challenges, new indices are needed. The goal of this study is to propose new model selection indices and to investigate their performances in the framework of latent growth mixture models with missing data and outliers in a Bayesian context. We consider latent growth models because they are very flexible in modeling complex data and becoming increasingly popular in statistical, psychological, behavioral, and educational areas. Specifically, this study conducted five simulation studies to cover different cases, including latent growth curve models with missing data, latent growth curve models with missing data and outliers, growth mixture models with missing data and outliers, extended growth mixture models with missing data and outliers, and latent growth models with different classes. Simulation results show that almost all proposed indices can effectively identify the true model. This study also illustrated the application of these model selection indices in real data analysis.
{"title":"How to Select the Best Fit Model among Bayesian Latent Growth Models for Complex Data","authors":"Laura Lu, Zhiyong Zhang","doi":"10.35566/jbds/v2n1/p2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.35566/jbds/v2n1/p2","url":null,"abstract":"Bayesian approach is becoming increasingly important as it provides many advantages in dealing with complex data. However, there is no well-defined model selection criterion or index in a Bayesian context. To address the challenges, new indices are needed. The goal of this study is to propose new model selection indices and to investigate their performances in the framework of latent growth mixture models with missing data and outliers in a Bayesian context. We consider latent growth models because they are very flexible in modeling complex data and becoming increasingly popular in statistical, psychological, behavioral, and educational areas. Specifically, this study conducted five simulation studies to cover different cases, including latent growth curve models with missing data, latent growth curve models with missing data and outliers, growth mixture models with missing data and outliers, extended growth mixture models with missing data and outliers, and latent growth models with different classes. Simulation results show that almost all proposed indices can effectively identify the true model. This study also illustrated the application of these model selection indices in real data analysis.","PeriodicalId":93575,"journal":{"name":"Journal of behavioral data science","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47074931","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In psychological research, class imbalance in binary outcome variables is a common occurrence, particularly in clinical variables (e.g., suicide outcomes). Class imbalance can present a number of difficulties for inference and prediction, prompting the development of a number of strategies that perform data augmentation through random sampling from just the positive cases, or from both the positive and negative cases. Through evaluation in benchmark datasets from computer science, these methods have shown marked improvements in predictive performance when the outcome is imbalanced. However, questions remain regarding generalizability to psychological data. To study this, we implemented a simulation study that tests a number of popular sampling strategies implemented in easy-to-use software, as well as in an empirical example focusing on the prediction of suicidal thoughts. In general, we found that while one sampling strategy demonstrated far worse performance even in comparison to no sampling, the other sampling methods performed similarly, evidencing slight improvements over no sampling. Further, we evaluated the sampling strategies across different forms of cross-validation, model fit metrics, and machine learning algorithms.
{"title":"Does Minority Case Sampling Improve Performance with Imbalanced Outcomes in Psychological Research?","authors":"R. Jacobucci, Xiaobei Li","doi":"10.35566/jbds/v2n1/p3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.35566/jbds/v2n1/p3","url":null,"abstract":"In psychological research, class imbalance in binary outcome variables is a common occurrence, particularly in clinical variables (e.g., suicide outcomes). Class imbalance can present a number of difficulties for inference and prediction, prompting the development of a number of strategies that perform data augmentation through random sampling from just the positive cases, or from both the positive and negative cases. Through evaluation in benchmark datasets from computer science, these methods have shown marked improvements in predictive performance when the outcome is imbalanced. However, questions remain regarding generalizability to psychological data. To study this, we implemented a simulation study that tests a number of popular sampling strategies implemented in easy-to-use software, as well as in an empirical example focusing on the prediction of suicidal thoughts. In general, we found that while one sampling strategy demonstrated far worse performance even in comparison to no sampling, the other sampling methods performed similarly, evidencing slight improvements over no sampling. Further, we evaluated the sampling strategies across different forms of cross-validation, model fit metrics, and machine learning algorithms.","PeriodicalId":93575,"journal":{"name":"Journal of behavioral data science","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49410087","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Algorithms play an increasingly important role in public policy decision-making. Despite this consequential role, little effort has been made to evaluate the extent to which people trust algorithms in decision-making, much less the personality characteristics associated with higher levels of trust. Such evaluations inform the widespread adoption and efficacy of algorithms in public policy decision-making. We explore the role of major personality inventories -- need for cognition, need to evaluate, the "Big 5" -- in shaping an individual's trust in public policy algorithms, specifically dealing with criminal justice sentencing. Through an original survey experiment, we find strong correlations between all personality types and general levels of trust in automation, as expected. Further, we uncovered evidence that need for cognition increases the weight given to advice from an algorithm relative to humans, and "agreeableness" decreases the distance between respondents' expectations and advice from a judge, relative to advice from a crowd.
{"title":"The Role of Personality in Trust in Public Policy Automation","authors":"Philip D. Waggoner, Ryan Kennedy","doi":"10.35566/jbds/v2n1/p4/","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.35566/jbds/v2n1/p4/","url":null,"abstract":"Algorithms play an increasingly important role in public policy decision-making. Despite this consequential role, little effort has been made to evaluate the extent to which people trust algorithms in decision-making, much less the personality characteristics associated with higher levels of trust. Such evaluations inform the widespread adoption and efficacy of algorithms in public policy decision-making. We explore the role of major personality inventories -- need for cognition, need to evaluate, the \"Big 5\" -- in shaping an individual's trust in public policy algorithms, specifically dealing with criminal justice sentencing. Through an original survey experiment, we find strong correlations between all personality types and general levels of trust in automation, as expected. Further, we uncovered evidence that need for cognition increases the weight given to advice from an algorithm relative to humans, and \"agreeableness\" decreases the distance between respondents' expectations and advice from a judge, relative to advice from a crowd.","PeriodicalId":93575,"journal":{"name":"Journal of behavioral data science","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48576186","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Multilevel modeling is often used to analyze survey data collected with a multistage sampling design. When the selection is informative, sampling weights need to be incorporated in the estimation. We propose a weighted residual bootstrap method as an alternative to the multilevel pseudo-maximum likelihood (MPML) estimators. In a Monte Carlo simulation using two-level linear mixed effects models, the bootstrap method showed advantages over MPML for the estimates and the statistical inferences of the intercept, the slope of the level-2 predictor, and the variance components at level-2. The impact of sample size, selection mechanism, intraclass correlation (ICC), and distributional assumptions on the performance of the methods were examined. The performance of MPML was suboptimal when sample size and ICC were small and when the normality assumption was violated. The bootstrap estimates performed generally well across all the simulation conditions, but had notably suboptimal performance in estimating the covariance component in a random slopes model when sample size and ICCs were large. As an illustration, the bootstrap method is applied to the American data of the OECD’s Program for International Students Assessment (PISA) survey on math achievement using the R package bootmlm.
{"title":"A Weighted Residual Bootstrap Method for Multilevel Modeling with Sampling Weights","authors":"Wen Luo, Hok Chio Lai","doi":"10.35566/jbds/v1n2/p6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.35566/jbds/v1n2/p6","url":null,"abstract":"Multilevel modeling is often used to analyze survey data collected with a multistage sampling design. When the selection is informative, sampling weights need to be incorporated in the estimation. We propose a weighted residual bootstrap method as an alternative to the multilevel pseudo-maximum likelihood (MPML) estimators. In a Monte Carlo simulation using two-level linear mixed effects models, the bootstrap method showed advantages over MPML for the estimates and the statistical inferences of the intercept, the slope of the level-2 predictor, and the variance components at level-2. The impact of sample size, selection mechanism, intraclass correlation (ICC), and distributional assumptions on the performance of the methods were examined. The performance of MPML was suboptimal when sample size and ICC were small and when the normality assumption was violated. The bootstrap estimates performed generally well across all the simulation conditions, but had notably suboptimal performance in estimating the covariance component in a random slopes model when sample size and ICCs were large. As an illustration, the bootstrap method is applied to the American data of the OECD’s Program for International Students Assessment (PISA) survey on math achievement using the R package bootmlm.","PeriodicalId":93575,"journal":{"name":"Journal of behavioral data science","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46484556","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In this tutorial, you will learn how to fit structural equation models (SEM) using Stata software. SEMs can be fit in Stata using the sem command for standard linear SEMs, the gsem command for generalized linear SEMs, or by drawing their path diagrams in the SEM Builder. After a brief introduction to Stata, the sem command will be demonstrated through a confirmatory factor analysis model, mediation model, group analysis, and a growth curve model, and the gsem command will be demonstrated through a random-slope model and a logistic ordinal regression. Materials and datasets are provided online, allowing anyone with Stata to follow along.
{"title":"Structural Equation Modeling using Stata","authors":"Meghan K Cain","doi":"10.35566/jbds/v1n2/p7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.35566/jbds/v1n2/p7","url":null,"abstract":"In this tutorial, you will learn how to fit structural equation models (SEM) using Stata software. SEMs can be fit in Stata using the sem command for standard linear SEMs, the gsem command for generalized linear SEMs, or by drawing their path diagrams in the SEM Builder. After a brief introduction to Stata, the sem command will be demonstrated through a confirmatory factor analysis model, mediation model, group analysis, and a growth curve model, and the gsem command will be demonstrated through a random-slope model and a logistic ordinal regression. Materials and datasets are provided online, allowing anyone with Stata to follow along.","PeriodicalId":93575,"journal":{"name":"Journal of behavioral data science","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49546681","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Shuai Zhou, Yanling Li, G. Chi, Junjun Yin, Zita Oravecz, Yosef Bodovski, N. Friedman, S. Vrieze, Sy-Miin Chow
Global Positioning System (GPS) data have become one of the routine data streams collected by wearable devices, cell phones, and social media platforms in this digital age. Such data provide research opportunities in that they may provide contextual information to elucidate where, when, and why individuals engage in and sustain particular behavioral patterns. However, raw GPS data consisting of densely sampled time series of latitude and longitude coordinate pairs do not readily convey meaningful information concerning intra-individual dynamics and inter-individual differences; substantial data processing is required. Raw GPS data need to be integrated into a Geographic Information System (GIS) and analyzed, from which the mobility and activity patterns of individuals can be derived, a process that is unfamiliar to many behavioral scientists. In this tutorial article, we introduced GPS2space, a free and open-source Python library that we developed to facilitate the processing of GPS data, integration with GIS to derive distances from landmarks of interest, as well as extraction of two spatial features: activity space of individuals and shared space between individuals, such as members of the same family. We demonstrated functions available in the library using data from the Colorado Online Twin Study to explore seasonal and age-related changes in individuals' activity space and twin siblings' shared space, as well as gender, zygosity and baseline age-related differences in their initial levels and/or changes over time. We concluded with discussions of other potential usages, caveats, and future developments of GPS2space.
{"title":"GPS2space: An Open-source Python Library for Spatial Measure Extraction from GPS Data.","authors":"Shuai Zhou, Yanling Li, G. Chi, Junjun Yin, Zita Oravecz, Yosef Bodovski, N. Friedman, S. Vrieze, Sy-Miin Chow","doi":"10.35566/jbds/v1n2/p5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.35566/jbds/v1n2/p5","url":null,"abstract":"Global Positioning System (GPS) data have become one of the routine data streams collected by wearable devices, cell phones, and social media platforms in this digital age. Such data provide research opportunities in that they may provide contextual information to elucidate where, when, and why individuals engage in and sustain particular behavioral patterns. However, raw GPS data consisting of densely sampled time series of latitude and longitude coordinate pairs do not readily convey meaningful information concerning intra-individual dynamics and inter-individual differences; substantial data processing is required. Raw GPS data need to be integrated into a Geographic Information System (GIS) and analyzed, from which the mobility and activity patterns of individuals can be derived, a process that is unfamiliar to many behavioral scientists. In this tutorial article, we introduced GPS2space, a free and open-source Python library that we developed to facilitate the processing of GPS data, integration with GIS to derive distances from landmarks of interest, as well as extraction of two spatial features: activity space of individuals and shared space between individuals, such as members of the same family. We demonstrated functions available in the library using data from the Colorado Online Twin Study to explore seasonal and age-related changes in individuals' activity space and twin siblings' shared space, as well as gender, zygosity and baseline age-related differences in their initial levels and/or changes over time. We concluded with discussions of other potential usages, caveats, and future developments of GPS2space.","PeriodicalId":93575,"journal":{"name":"Journal of behavioral data science","volume":"1 2 1","pages":"127-155"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47864578","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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