10/3/2024 Alexander Christensen: A Test for Ergodicity
CCN Brown Bag
Alexander Christensen, PhD
Assistant Professor of Psychology and Human Development
Data Science Institute Affiliate Faculty
Date: Thursday, October 3, 2024
Time: 12:10PM-1PM
Location: 316 Wilson Hall
A Test for Ergodicity
In the last half of the 20th century, psychology and neuroscience have experienced a renewed interest in intraindividual variation. To date, there are few quantitative methods to evaluate whether a population (between-person) structure is likely to hold for individual people, often referred to as ergodicity. I’ll introduce and discuss a new network information theoretic metric, the ergodicity information index (EII), that quantifies the amount of information lost by representing all individuals with a between-person structure. A bootstrap test is derived to statistically determine whether the empirical data are likely generated from an ergodic process. An empirical example using resting state neuroimaging data of younger and older adults will be presented.
Something folks should know: Outside of developing network scientific methods for psychology, I have substantive interests in personality. A secret career objective of mine is to dismantle the Big Five to move forward with a more complex understanding of who we are as individuals.
Something most folks don’t know: I’ve never been a good academic student. I graded high school with a sub-3 GPA, and I was academically suspended from community college before the end of my second year. Academia is probably the last place most folks would expect me to be.
Questions? Contact Isabel Gauthier.