Network Mapping with GIMME

ABSTRACT

Network science is booming! While the insights and images afforded by network mapping techniques are compelling, implementing the techniques is often daunting to researchers. Thus, the aim of this tutorial is to facilitate implementation in the context of GIMME, or group iterative multiple model estimation. GIMME is an automated network analysis approach for intensive longitudinal data. It creates person-specific networks that explain how variables are related in a system. The relations can signify current or future prediction that is common across people or applicable only to an individual. The tutorial begins with conceptual and mathematical descriptions of GIMME. It proceeds with a practical discussion of analysis steps, including data acquisition, preprocessing, program operation, a posteriori testing of model assumptions, and interpretation of results; throughout, a small empirical data set is analyzed to showcase the GIMME analysis pipeline. The tutorial closes with a brief overview of extensions to GIMME that may interest researchers whose questions and data sets have certain features. By the end of the tutorial, researchers will be equipped to begin analyzing the temporal dynamics of their heterogeneous time series data with GIMME.

KEYWORDS:

• Connectivity
• idiographic vs. nomothetic methods
• intensive longitudinal data
• time series analysis
• unified structural equation modeling

Article Information

Conflict of Interest Disclosures: Each author signed a form for disclosure of potential conflicts of interest. No authors reported any financial or other conflicts of interest in relation to the work described.

Ethical Principles: The authors affirm having followed professional ethical guidelines in preparing this work. These guidelines include obtaining informed consent from human participants, maintaining ethical treatment and respect for the rights of human or animal participants, and ensuring the privacy of participants and their data, such as ensuring that individual participants cannot be identified in reported results or from publicly available original or archival data.

Funding: This work was supported in part by Grant 1R01EB022904-01 to K. Gates from the National Institutes of Health – National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioinformatics (NIH-NIBIB).

Role of the Funders/Sponsors: None of the funders or sponsors of this research had any role in the design and conduct of the study; collection, management, analysis, and interpretation of data; preparation, review, or approval of the manuscript; or decision to submit the manuscript for publication.

Acknowledgments: The authors would like to thank Peter Molenaar for supporting and encouraging this important work as well as Amy Loviska and members of the Methods, Sex differences, and Development Lab at the University of Michigan for their assistance collecting and preparing the empirical data presented in this tutorial. The ideas and opinions expressed herein are those of the authors alone, and endorsement by the authors' institutions or NIH-NIBIB is not intended and should not be inferred.