A prototype model for evaluating psychiatric research strategies: Diagnostic category-based approaches vs. the RDoC approach

TL;DR

This paper introduces a theoretical framework to compare diagnostic category-based and RDoC dimensional approaches in psychiatric research, focusing on their statistical power to detect pathogenetic factors.

Contribution

It provides a novel statistical modeling framework to evaluate and compare the effectiveness of different psychiatric research strategies.

Findings

The framework quantifies detection efficiency of pathogenetic factors.

Theoretical results highlight strengths and weaknesses of each approach.

Numerical simulations illustrate the comparative performance.

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a theoretical framework for evaluating psychiatric research strategies. The strategies to be evaluated include a conventional diagnostic category-based approach and dimensional approach that have been encouraged by the National Institute for Mental Health (NIMH), outlined as Research Domain Criteria (RDoC). The proposed framework is based on the statistical modeling of the processes by which pathogenetic factors are translated to behavioral measures and how the research strategies can detect potential pathogenetic factors. The framework provides the statistical power for quantifying how efficiently relevant pathogenetic factors are detected under various conditions. We present several theoretical and numerical results highlighting the merits and demerits of the strategies.