Idiographic Personality Gaussian Process for Psychological Assessment

We develop a novel measurement framework based on a Gaussian process coregionalization model to address a long-lasting debate in psychometrics: whether psychological features like personality share a common structure across the population, vary uniquely for individuals, or some combination. We propose the idiographic personality Gaussian process (IPGP) framework, an intermediate model that accommodates both shared trait structure across a population and “idiographic” deviations for individuals. IPGP leverages the Gaussian process coregionalization model to handle the grouped nature of battery responses, but adjusted to non-Gaussian ordinal data. We further exploit stochastic variational inference for efficient latent factor estimation required for idiographic modeling at scale. Using synthetic and real data, we show that IPGP improves both prediction of actual responses and estimation of individualized factor structures relative to existing benchmarks. In a third study, we show that IPGP also identifies unique clusters of personality taxonomies in real-world data, displaying great potential to advance individualized approaches to psychological diagnosis and treatment.