Author:

Keywords:

Bayesian statistics, maximum likelihood, weakly informative prior, single-case designs, two-level modeling, Social Sciences, Psychology, Multidisciplinary, Psychology, 2-level modeling, BASE-LINE DATA, INTERVENTION, DESIGNS, METAANALYSIS, AUTOCORRELATION, PARAMETERS, RECOVERY, BEHAVIOR, ARTICLE, BROWNE, Bayes Theorem, Humans, Likelihood Functions, Multilevel Analysis, Outcome Assessment, Health Care, Research Design, 1701 Psychology, 1702 Cognitive Sciences, Social Sciences Methods, 4905 Statistics, 5201 Applied and developmental psychology, 5205 Social and personality psychology

Abstract:

The focus of this paper is to describe Bayesian estimation, including construction of prior distributions, and to compare parameter recovery under the Bayesian framework (using weakly informative priors) and the maximum likelihood (ML) framework in the context of multilevel modeling of single-case experimental data. Bayesian estimation results were found similar to ML estimation results in terms of the treatment effect estimates, regardless of the functional form and degree of information included in the prior specification in the Bayesian framework. In terms of the variance component estimates, both the ML and Bayesian estimation procedures result in biased and less precise variance estimates when the number of participants is small (i.e., 3). By increasing the number of participants to 5 or 7, the relative bias is close to 5% and more precise estimates are obtained for all approaches, except for the inverse-Wishart prior using the identity matrix. When a more informative prior was added, more precise estimates for the fixed effects and random effects were obtained, even when only three participants were included.