The definition and measurement of heterogeneity

Abraham Nunes, Thomas Trappenberg, Martin Alda

Producción científica: Contribución a una revistaArtículo de revisiónrevisión exhaustiva

40 Citas (Scopus)

Resumen

Heterogeneity is an important concept in psychiatric research and science more broadly. It negatively impacts effect size estimates under case–control paradigms, and it exposes important flaws in our existing categorical nosology. Yet, our field has no precise definition of heterogeneity proper. We tend to quantify heterogeneity by measuring associated correlates such as entropy or variance: practices which are akin to accepting the radius of a sphere as a measure of its volume. Under a definition of heterogeneity as the degree to which a system deviates from perfect conformity, this paper argues that its proper measure roughly corresponds to the size of a system’s event/sample space, and has units known as numbers equivalent. We arrive at this conclusion through focused review of more than 100 years of (re)discoveries of indices by ecologists, economists, statistical physicists, and others. In parallel, we review psychiatric approaches for quantifying heterogeneity, including but not limited to studies of symptom heterogeneity, microbiome biodiversity, cluster-counting, and time-series analyses. We argue that using numbers equivalent heterogeneity measures could improve the interpretability and synthesis of psychiatric research on heterogeneity. However, significant limitations must be overcome for these measures—largely developed for economic and ecological research—to be useful in modern translational psychiatric science.

Idioma originalEnglish
Número de artículo299
PublicaciónTranslational Psychiatry
Volumen10
N.º1
DOI
EstadoPublished - dic. 1 2020

Nota bibliográfica

Funding Information:
Genome Canada (M.A., A.N.), Dalhousie Department of Psychiatry Research Fund (M.A., A.N.), Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (T.T.), Nova Scotia Health Research Foundation Scotia Scholars Graduate Scholarship (A.N.), Killam Postgraduate Scholarship (A.N.), Lindsay Family Research Fund (M.A.), and Ruth Wagner Memorial Fund (A.N.).

Publisher Copyright:
© 2020, The Author(s).

ASJC Scopus Subject Areas

  • Psychiatry and Mental health
  • Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience
  • Biological Psychiatry

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