Parsing inter-individual differences with normative modelling

COEX 

Normative modelling is rapidly becoming an established method for understanding inter-individual differences in clinical and population-based cohorts. While this approach has been used principally for detecting individualised deviations from age-related trajectories, it is also ideally suited to understanding variation in arbitrary mappings between brain and behaviour, for example learning mappings between cognitive instruments and task-related brain activity, and for mapping the influence of rich clinical symptom profiles and brain structure. In this talk, I will survey some of this emerging literature, highlighting applications from our group that aim to learn multi-dimensional mappings between brain and behaviour at voxel level precision and understanding fine patterns of individual difference and how these relate to external variables, such as environmental adversities. I will also showcase methodological developments from our group that enable the identification of individuals with atypical profiles, for example based on extreme value statistics. I will show that normative modelling provides a comprehensive platform for understanding individual differences.