CCNP Researcher Daniel Bennett, along with CCNP Co-Directors Yael Niv and Steve Silverstein, have a new perspectives piece in the most recent issue of JAMA Psychiatry entitled “The Two Cultures of Computational Psychiatry”. Computational psychiatry is a rapidly growing research field that uses tools from cognitive science, computational neuroscience, and machine learning to study difficult psychiatric questions. In this paper, CCNP investigators discuss two distinct research approaches that are encompassed within this field: explanatory modelling and machine learning. Explanatory modelling research aims to explain the computational-biological mechanisms of psychiatric illness, whereas machine learning research uses advanced statistical tools to predict psychiatric outcomes from large-scale datasets. In the case of machine learning, this may also involve classifying patients into subgroups based on previously unknown combinations of variables, which may help in the characterization of heterogeneity across diagnoses, and the individualization of treatment You can find the full article here.
