Edited by: Yaroslav O. Halchenko, Dartmouth College, USA
Reviewed by: Michael Hanke, Otto-von-Guericke-University, Germany; Eric-Jan Wagenmakers, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands; Dylan D. Wagner, Dartmouth College, USA
*Correspondence: Thomas V. Wiecki, Department of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences, Brown University, 190 Thayer St., Providence, RI 02912-1821, USA e-mail:
†These authors have contributed equally to this work.
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
The diffusion model is a commonly used tool to infer latent psychological processes underlying decision-making, and to link them to neural mechanisms based on response times. Although efficient open source software has been made available to quantitatively fit the model to data, current estimation methods require an abundance of response time measurements to recover meaningful parameters, and only provide point estimates of each parameter. In contrast, hierarchical Bayesian parameter estimation methods are useful for enhancing statistical power, allowing for simultaneous estimation of individual subject parameters and the group distribution that they are drawn from, while also providing measures of uncertainty in these parameters in the posterior distribution. Here, we present a novel Python-based toolbox called HDDM (hierarchical drift diffusion model), which allows fast and flexible estimation of the the drift-diffusion model and the related linear ballistic accumulator model. HDDM requires fewer data per subject/condition than non-hierarchical methods, allows for full Bayesian data analysis, and can handle outliers in the data. Finally, HDDM supports the estimation of how trial-by-trial measurements (e.g., fMRI) influence decision-making parameters. This paper will first describe the theoretical background of the drift diffusion model and Bayesian inference. We then illustrate usage of the toolbox on a real-world data set from our lab. Finally, parameter recovery studies show that HDDM beats alternative fitting methods like the χ2-quantile method as well as maximum likelihood estimation. The software and documentation can be downloaded at:
Sequential sampling models (SSMs) (Townsend and Ashby,
Bayesian data analytic methods are quickly gaining popularity in the cognitive sciences because of their many desirable properties (Kruschke,
This report is intended to familiarize experimentalists with the usage and benefits of HDDM. The purpose of this report is thus two-fold; (1) we briefly introduce the toolbox and provide a tutorial on a real-world data set (a more comprehensive description of all the features can be found online); and (2) characterize its success in recovering model parameters by performing a parameter recovery study using simulated data to compare the hierarchical model used in HDDM to non-hierarchical or non-Bayesian methods as a function of the number of subjects and trials. We show that it outperforms these other methods and has greater power to detect dependencies of model parameters on other measures such as brain activity, when such relationships are present in the data. These simulation results can also inform experimental design by showing minimum number of trials and subjects to achieve a desired level of precision.
SSMs generally fall into one of two classes: (1) diffusion models which assume that
As input these methods require trial-by-trial RT and choice data (HDDM currently only supports binary decisions) as illustrated in the below example table:
0.8 | 1 | hard | 0.01 |
1.2 | 0 | easy | 0.23 |
0.25 | 1 | hard | −0.3 |
The DDM models decision-making in two-choice tasks. Each choice is represented as an upper and lower boundary. A drift-process accumulates evidence over time until it crosses one of the two boundaries and initiates the corresponding response (Ratcliff and Rouder,
An analytic solution to the resulting probability distribution of the termination times was provided by Wald (
Since the formula contains an infinite sum, HDDM uses an approximation provided by Navarro and Fuss (
Subsequently, the DDM was extended to include additional noise parameters capturing inter-trial variability in the drift-rate, the non-decision time and the starting point in order to account for two phenomena observed in decision-making tasks, most notably cases where errors are faster or slower than correct responses. Models that take this into account are referred to as the full DDM (Ratcliff and Rouder,
Statistics and machine learning have developed efficient and versatile Bayesian methods to solve various inference problems (Poirier,
HDDM includes several hierarchical Bayesian model formulations for the DDM and LBA. For illustrative purposes we present the graphical model depiction of a hierarchical DDM with informative priors and group-only inter-trial variability parameters in Figure
Graphical nodes are distributed as follows:
and
HDDM then uses Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) (Gamerman and Lopes,
Note that the exact form of the model will be user-dependent; consider as an example a model where separate drift-rates
In the following we will demonstrate how HDDM can be used to infer different components of the decision-making process in a reward-based learning task. While demonstrating core features this is by no means a complete overview of all the functionality in HDDM. For more information, an online tutorial and a reference manual see
Python requires modules to be imported before they can be used. The following code imports the
It is recommended to store your trial-by-trial response time and choice data in a csv (comma-separated-value, see below for exact specifications) file. In this example we will be using data collected in a reward-based decision-making experiment in our lab (Cavanagh et al.,
The first ten lines of the data file look as follows.
The first row represents the column names; each following row corresponds to values associated with a column on an individual trial. While
The
The
We recommend drawing between 2000 and 10,000 posterior samples, depending on the convergence. Discarding the first 20–1000 samples as burn-in is often enough in our experience. Auto-correlation of the samples can be reduced by adding the
Note that it is also possible to fit a non-hierarchical model to an individual subject by setting
The inference algorithm, MCMC, requires the chains of the model to have properly converged. While there is no way to guarantee convergence for a finite set of samples in MCMC, there are many heuristics that allow identification of problems of convergence. One analysis to perform is to visually investigate the trace, the autocorrelation, and the marginal posterior. These can be plotted using the
Problematic patterns in the trace would be drifts or large jumps which are absent here. The autocorrelation should also drop to zero rather quickly (i.e., well smaller than 50) when considering the influence of past samples, as is the case here.
The Gelman-Rubin
Which produces the following output (abridged to preserve space):
Values should be close to 1 and not larger than 1.02 which would indicate convergence problems.
Once convinced that the chains have properly converged we can analyze the posterior values. The
The output contains various summary statistics describing the posterior of each parameter: group mean parameter for threshold
As noted above, this model did not take the different conditions into account. To test whether the different reward conditions affect drift-rate we create a new model which estimates separate drift-rate
Note that while every subject was tested on each condition in this case, this is not a requirement. The
We next turn to comparing the posterior for the different drift-rate conditions. To plot the different traces we need to access the underlying node object. These are stored inside the
Based on Figure
One benefit of estimating the model in a Bayesian framework is that we can do significance testing directly on the posterior rather than relying on frequentist statistics (Lindley,
Which produces the following output.
In addition to computing the overlap of the posterior distributions we can compare whether the added complexity of models with additional degrees of freedom is justified to account for the data using model selection. The deviance information criterion (Spiegelhalter et al.,
Which produces the following output:
Based on the lower DIC score for the model allowing drift-rate to vary by stimulus condition we might conclude that it provides better fit than the model which forces the drift-rates to be equal, despite the increased complexity.
Note that Bayesian hypothesis testing and model comparison are areas of active research. One alternative to analyzing the posterior directly and the DIC score is the Bayes Factor (e.g., Wagenmakers et al.,
As mentioned above, cognitive neuroscience has embraced the DDM as it enables to link psychological processes to cognitive brain measures. The Cavanagh et al. (
The
Which produces the following output:
Instead of estimating one static threshold per subject across trials, this model assumes the threshold to vary on each trial according to the linear model specified above (as a function of their measured theta activity). Cavanagh et al. (
As noted above, this experiment also tested patients on deep brain stimulation (DBS). Figure
Finally,
To quantify the quality of the fit of our hierarchical Bayesian method we ran three simulation experiments. All code to replicate the simulation experiments can be found online at
For the first and second experiments, we simulated an experiment with two drift-rates (
For each experiment and each manipulated factor (subjects, trials), we generated 30 multi-subject data-sets by randomly sampling group parameters. For the first and second experiment, the group parameters were sampled from a uniform distribution
We compared four methods: (i) the hierarchical Bayesian model presented above with a within subject effect (HB); (ii) a non-hierarchical Bayesian model, which estimates each subject individually (nHB); (iii) the χ2-Quantile method on individual subjects (Ratcliff and Tuerlinckx,
To investigate the difference in parameter recovery between the methods, we computed the mean absolute error of the recovery for each parameter and method in the trials experiment (we also computed this for the subjects experiment but results are qualitatively similar and omitted for brevity). We excluded the largest errors (5%) from our calculation for each method to avoid cases where unrealistic parameters were recovered (this happened only for ML and the quantiles method).
For each dataset and estimation method in the subject experiment we computed whether the drift-rate difference was detected (we also computed this for the trials experiment but results are qualitatively similar and omitted for brevity). For the non-hierarchical methods (ML, quantiles, nHB), a difference is detected if a paired
In the third experiment, we investigated the detection likelihood of trial-by-trial effects of a given covariate (e.g., a brain measure) on the drift-rate. We fixed the number of subjects at 12, and manipulated both the covariate effect-size (0.1, 0.3, 0.5) and the number of trials (20, 30, 40, 50, 75, 100, 150). To generate data, we first sample an auxiliary variable, α
We compared all previous methods except the quantiles method, which cannot be used to estimate trial-by-trial effects. For the non-hierarchical methods (ML, quantiles, nHB), an effect is detected if a one sample
The detection likelihood results for the first experiment are very similar to the results of the second experiment, and were omitted for the sake of brevity. The HB method had the lowest recovery error and highest likelihood of detection in all experiments (Figures
The differences between the hierarchical and non-hierarchical methods in parameter recovery are mainly noticeable for the decision threshold and the two drift rates for every number of trials we tested, and it is most profound when the number of trials is very small (Figure
Using data from our lab on a reward-based learning and decision-making task (Cavanagh et al.,
In a set of simulation studies we demonstrate that the hierarchical model estimation used in
In conclusion,
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
The authors are thankful to Guido Biele, Øystein Sandvik and Eric-Jan Wagenmakers for useful feedback and/or code contributions. This work was supported by NIMH Grant RO1 MH080066-01 and NSF Grant #1125788.
The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: