Elucidating Age and Sex-Dependent Association Between Frontal EEG Asymmetry and Depression: An Application of Multiple Imputation in Functional Regression

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Ciarleglio, Adam; Petkova, Eva; Harel, Ofer
• 署名单位: George Washington University; New York University; New York University; University of Connecticut
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN STATISTICAL ASSOCIATION
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0162-1459
• DOI: 10.1080/01621459.2021.1942011
• 发表日期: 2022
• 页码: 12-26
• 关键词: missing data; alpha asymmetry; EFFICIENCY

摘要

Frontal power asymmetry (FA), a measure of brain function derived from electroencephalography, is a potential biomarker for major depressive disorder (MDD). Though FA is functional in nature, it is typically reduced to a scalar value prior to analysis, possibly obscuring its relationship with MDD and leading to a number of studies that have provided contradictory results. To overcome this issue, we sought to fit a functional regression model to characterize the association between FA and MDD status, adjusting for age, sex, cognitive ability, and handedness using data from a large clinical study that included both MDD and healthy control (HC) subjects. Since nearly 40% of the observations are missing data on either FA or cognitive ability, we propose an extension of multiple imputation (MI) by chained equations that allows for the imputation of both scalar and functional data. We also propose an extension of Rubin's Rules for conducting valid inference in this setting. The proposed methods are evaluated in a simulation and applied to our FA data. For our FA data, a pooled analysis from the imputed datasets yielded similar results to those of the complete case analysis. We found that, among young females, HCs tended to have higher FA over the theta, alpha, and beta frequency bands, but that the difference between HC and MDD subjects diminishes and ultimately reverses with age. For males, HCs tended to have higher FA in the beta frequency band, regardless of age. Young male HCs had higher FA in the theta and alpha bands, but this difference diminishes with increasing age in the a band and ultimately reverses with increasing age in the theta band. Supplementary materials for this article, including a standardized description of the materials available for reproducing the work, are available as an online supplement.