Bridge Centrality: A Network Approach to Understanding Comorbidity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recently, researchers in clinical psychology have endeavored to create network models of the relationships between symptoms, both within and across mental disorders. Symptoms that connect two mental disorders are called "bridge symptoms." Unfortunately, no formal quantitative methods for identifying these bridge symptoms exist. Accordingly, we developed four network statistics to identify bridge symptoms: bridge strength, bridge betweenness, bridge closeness, and bridge expected influence. These statistics are nonspecific to the type of network estimated, making them potentially useful in individual-level psychometric networks, group-level psychometric networks, and networks outside the field of psychopathology such as social networks. We first tested the fidelity of our statistics in predicting bridge nodes in a series of simulations. Averaged across all conditions, the statistics achieved a sensitivity of 92.7% and a specificity of 84.9%. By simulating datasets of varying sample sizes, we tested the robustness of our statistics, confirming their suitability for network psychometrics. Furthermore, we simulated the contagion of one mental disorder to another, showing that deactivating bridge nodes prevents the spread of comorbidity (i.e., one disorder activating another). Eliminating nodes based on bridge statistics was more effective than eliminating nodes high on traditional centrality statistics in preventing comorbidity. Finally, we applied our algorithms to 18 group-level empirical comorbidity networks from published studies and discussed the implications of this analysis.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.037 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".