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Constrained Multivariate Functional Principal Components Analysis for Novel Outcomes in Eye-Tracking Experiments

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Abstract

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) tend to experience greater difficulties with social communication and sensory information processing. Of particular interest in ASD biomarker research is the study of visual attention, effectively quantified in eye tracking (ET) experiments. Eye tracking offers a powerful, safe, and feasible platform for gaining insights into attentional processes by measuring moment-by-moment gaze patterns in response to stimuli. Even though recording is done with millisecond granularity, analyses commonly collapse data across trials into variables such as proportion time spent looking at a region of interest (ROI). In addition, looking times in different ROIs are typically analyzed separately. We propose a novel multivariate functional outcome that carries proportion looking time information from multiple regions of interest jointly as a function of trial type, along with a novel constrained multivariate functional principal components analysis procedure to capture the variation in this outcome. The method incorporates the natural constraint that the proportion looking times from the multiple regions of interest must sum up to one. Our approach is motivated by the Activity Monitoring task, a social-attentional assay within the ET battery of the Autism Biomarkers Consortium for Clinical Trials (ABC-CT). Application of our methods to the ABC-CT data yields new insights into dominant modes of variation of proportion looking times from multiple regions of interest for school-age children with ASD and their typically developing (TD) peers, as well as richer analysis of diagnostic group differences in social attention.

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Data Availiability

The ABC-CT data are publicly available at NIMH NDA (#2288) (https://nda.nih.gov/edit_collection.html?id=2288). The R code and documentation for implementing the CS-MFPCA on simulated datasets are provided on Github at https://github.com/dsenturk/CS-MFPCA.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the ABC-CT investigators for making this study possible. We thank the staff, patients, and families involved in the ABC-CT study.

Funding

This work was supported by National Institute of Mental Health R01 MH122428 and U19 MH108206.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biostatistics, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Brian Kwan, Catherine A. Sugar, Qi Qian & Damla Şentürk

  2. Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Catherine A. Sugar

  3. Center for Child Health, Behavior and Development, Seattle Children’s Research Institute, Seattle, WA, USA

    Frederick Shic & Sara J. Webb

  4. Department of Pediatrics, School of Medicine, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

    Frederick Shic

  5. Child Study Center, School of Medicine, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

    Adam Naples & James C. McPartland

  6. Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Scott P. Johnson

  7. Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

    Sara J. Webb

  8. Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, Keck School of Medicine, University of South California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Shafali Jeste

  9. Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience, Division of Developmental Medicine, Boston Children’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA

    Susan Faja

  10. Department of Neurology, Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA

    April R. Levin

  11. Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

    Geraldine Dawson

Authors
  1. Brian Kwan
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  2. Catherine A. Sugar
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  3. Qi Qian
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  4. Frederick Shic
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  5. Adam Naples
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  6. Scott P. Johnson
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  7. Sara J. Webb
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  8. Shafali Jeste
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  9. Susan Faja
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  10. April R. Levin
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  11. Geraldine Dawson
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  12. James C. McPartland
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  13. Damla Şentürk
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Damla Şentürk.

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Conflict of interest

McPartland consults with Customer Value Partners, Bridgebio, Determined Health, and BlackThorn Therapeutics, has received research funding from Janssen Research and Development, serves on the Scientific Advisory Boards of Pastorus and Modern Clinics, and receives royalties from Guilford Press, Lambert, Oxford, and Springer. Shic consults for Roche Pharmaceutical Company, Janssen Research and Development, BlackThorn Therapeutics, and BioStream Technologies.

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Kwan, B., Sugar, C.A., Qian, Q. et al. Constrained Multivariate Functional Principal Components Analysis for Novel Outcomes in Eye-Tracking Experiments. Stat Biosci (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12561-023-09399-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12561-023-09399-1

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