BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article
Front. Psychiatry
Sec. Personality Disorders
A case study on using quantile regression in psychiatry research
Provisionally accepted
- Biostatistics, National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS), Bangalore, India
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Commonly used linear regression focuses only on the effect on the mean value of the dependent variable and may not be useful in situations where relationships across the distribution are of interest. This study aims to appraise the utility of Quantile Regression (QR), a technique that can model any quantile value of the dependent variable. The primary aim of this study is to provide an overview of QR method and its practical applications in psychiatry research. We demonstrated it with an exploratory analysis of the data on the neuropsychological test performances among 119 subjects with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Varying effects of age, education, gender, use of antipsychotics and symptom severity between extreme quantiles were highlighted using simple and multiple QR models. While linear regression is easy to employ and interpret, QR is not only on par in performance but also more flexible in identifying a set of factors that may be different depending on the quantile of interest. QR analysis is a potent tool in applications where the effect of independent variable vary depending on the values of the outcome variable. The results of this exploratory study that the QR approach could potentially help explore the inconsistent findings, generate future hypotheses and/or possible interpretive frameworks for inconsistencies observed in neuropsychological research in OCD. As QR offers complete distributional analysis, it is valuable in providing new insights, especially in situations where the usual regression assumptions are violated or when interested in extreme values of outcome of interest.
Keywords: quantile regression, linear regression, Neuropsychological Tests, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Non-normal distribution
Received: 18 Jun 2025; Accepted: 24 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Girikematha Shankar, Thennarasu, Kashyap and Reddy. 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.
* Correspondence: Ravi Girikematha Shankar
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.