Tutorials

New to psychological network analysis? Looking for an overview of the literature, or tutorials on how to estimate network models? This site contains a list of introduction and tutorial papers, articles, and blog posts. If you know of other good resources, please let me know so I can update the page.

Contents

Workshop materials

The best starting point to pick up both network theory and network methodology are the workshops and summer/winter schools we have been giving. Materials for the last 5-day winter school in Amsterdam 2019 are available on the Open Science Framework. Materials for the international 1 to 3-day workshops we have been giving in the last few years are also available online for free.

Psych-networks.com tutorials

11/2019 | R tutorial: clique percolation to detect communities in networks
09/2018 | How to interpret centrality values in network structures (not)
09/2018 | (Mis)interpreting Networks: An Abbreviated Tutorial on Visualizations
07/2018 | Tutorial: Interpretation of bootstrapped edges after regularization
02/2018 | Tutorial: why is my network unstable?
12/2017 | The network approach to psychopathology: pitfalls, challenges, and future directions
06/2017 | R tutorial: using the Network Comparison Test
01/2017 | Tutorial: how to review psychopathology network papers
12/2016 | R tutorial: how to identify communities of items in networks
11/2016 | R tutorial: power issues & robustness of network models

Conceptual/theory papers and book chapters

Borsboom, D. (2017). A network theory of mental disorders. World Psychiatry. (PDF)
Fried, E. I., van Borkulo, C. D., Cramer, A. O. J., Boschloo, L., Schoevers, R. A., & Borsboom, D. (2017). Mental disorders as networks of problems: a review of recent insights. Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology. (PDF)
Mõttus, R., & Allerhand, M. (2017). Why do traits come together? The underlying trait and network approaches. In V. Zeigler-Hill & T. Shackelford (Eds.), SAGE handbook of personality and individual differences: Volume 1. The science of personality and individual differences. (PDF)
McNally, R. J. (2016). Can network analysis transform psychopathology? Behaviour Research and Therapy.(PDF)
Borsboom, D., & Cramer, A. O. J. (2013). Network analysis: an integrative approach to the structure of psychopathology. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology. (PFD)
Kendler, K. S., Zachar, P., & Craver, C. (2011). What kinds of things are psychiatric disorders? Psychological Medicine. (PDF)
Cramer, A. O. J., Waldorp, L. J., van der Maas, H. L. J., & Borsboom, D. (2010). Comorbidity: a network perspective. The Behavioral and Brain Sciences. (PDF)

Blogs

2018 blog on CRAN “An Introduction to Directed Acyclic Graphs” by Malcolm Barrett, using the R package ggdag
2018 blog by Sacha Epskamp & the Psychosystems team on problems with lasso regularized network estimation and how to get around these issues, inspired by recent work of Williams & Rast (1, 2)
2018 summary of numerous free online courses by the Penn State Social Science Research Institute, many on analyses of intensive longitudinal data.
2018 blog by Katya Ognyanova on Static and dynamic network visualization with R
2018 R course by Kevin Kotzé on time series analysis.
2018 R tutorial by Derek de Beurs on how to estimate Gaussian Graphical Models and Mixed Graphical Models on suicide, based on a recent publication.
2018 blog by Sacha Epskamp discussing potential issues with regularized networks, and solutions implemented in qgraph to tackle these.
2017 blog by John Flournoy on estimating cross-lagged panel models in R via lavaan.
2017 blog by Payton Jones, Patrick Mair and Richard McNally: Scaling networks for two-dimensional visualization: a tutorial. Includes the Fruchterman-Reingold algorithm, multidimensional scaling, principal components plotting, and eigenmodel networks
2017 blog by Fred Hasselmann: testing time-series data for stationarity
2017 blog by Xiao Yan called Intraindividual Variability + Network Analysis Tutorial
2017 blog by Jonas Haslbeck on Predictability in network models; allows you to estimate how much R^2 of each node in the network is explained by its neighbors
2017 blogs by Jonas Haslbeck on Mixed graphical models (MGM). In contrast to the Ising Model (binary data) and the Gaussian Graphical Model (continuous data), MGM can feature different types of variables in the same network. Tutorial 1: estimating MGMs, tutorial 2: interactions between categorical variables
2017 blog by Derek de Beurs: network estimation, inference, & stability for a paper on suicide
2016 network analysis cookbook by Sacha Epskamp

Papers

Haslbeck, Bringmann, & Waldorp (preprint): How to estimate time-varying Vector Autoregressive Models? A comparison of two methods. (PDF)
Epskamp & Fried (2018). A Tutorial on Regularized Partial Correlation Networks, Psychological Methods.This tutorial paper explains in detail how regularization works in psychological networks, and includes a long FAQ on common problems and issues encountered when estimating between subjects networks (PDF)
Beltz & Gates (2017). Network Mapping with GIMME. Multivariate Behavioral Research. (PDF)
Costantini et al. (2017). Stability and variability of personality networks. Personality and Individual Differences. A tutorial on recent developments in network psychometrics. Personality and Individual Differences. Shows how to disentangle within from between person effects, and introduces the Fused Graphical Lasso (simultaneous network estimation across different groups). (PDF)
Dalege et al. (2017). Network Analysis on Attitudes. Social Psychological and Personality Science. Tutorial on the estimation, analysis, and simulation on attitude networks. (PDF)
Epskamp, Borsboom & Fried (2017). Estimating Psychological Networks and their Accuracy: A Tutorial Paper. Behavioral Research Methods. Covers network estimation, inference, and accuracy of parameter estimates. (PDF)
Bringmann et al. (2016). Assessing Temporal Emotion Dynamics Using Networks. Assessment (PDF). The supplementary materials of this paper contain both R and Matlab codes.
Costantini et al. (2015). State of the aRt personality research: A tutorial on network analysis of personality data in R. Journal of Research in Personality. (PDF)

Other media

Free E-Book “Ecological Momentary Assessment in Mental Health Research: A Practical Introduction, with Examples in R, by Jeroen Ruwaard, Lisa Kooistra, & Melissa Thong
2017: Claudia van Borkulo’s thesis contains a tutorial on the Network Comparison Test

Limitations and criticism of the network approach

Williams & Rast (2019). Back to the basics: Rethinking partial correlation network methodology. British Journal of Mathematical and Statistical Psychology.
Williams et al. (2019). On Nonregularized Estimation of Psychological Networks. Multivariate Behavioral Research.
Bringmann et al. (2019). What do centrality measures measure in psychological networks? Preprint
Fried & Cramer (2017). Moving forward: challenges and directions for psychopathological network theory and methodology. Perspectives on Psychological Science. (Preprint)
Guloksuz, Pries, & Van Os (2017). Application of network methods for understanding mental disorders: pitfalls and promise. Psychological Medicine, 1–10. 10.1017/S0033291717001350. (PDF)
Bulteel et al. (2016). Using raw VAR regression coefficients to build networks can be misleading. Multivariate Behavioral Research, 51, 330-344. (URL)
Terluin, de Boer, & de Vet (2016). Differences in Connection Strength between Mental Symptoms Might Be Explained by Differences in Variance: Reanalysis of Network Data Did Not Confirm Staging. PLOS ONE 11(11): e0155205. (URL)

(Disclaimer: If you have suggestions of tutorials that should be included here, please let me know. Manuscripts provided here are for academic purposes only and not intended for mass dissemination or copying. Please refer to applicable fair use laws, including the restrictions from publication copyright holders.)