Community detection in subject-subject networks from psychometrics data

Abstract

Identifying subgroups of respondents in psychometric data is traditionally addressed with Latent Class Analysis, which requires the number of classes to be specified a priori and can perform poorly when strong inter-item correlations violate local independence assumptions. We propose a network-theoretic alternative based on community detection in subject-subject similarity networks. To suppress the systematic artifacts induced by the factor structure of the items, the similarity is computed in a low-dimensional factor-score space and the null model for modularity maximisation is obtained by removing the leading (global) mode of the similarity matrix, rather than via the standard Newman--Girvan model. The significance of a detected partition is then assessed against a column-wise resampling null through four complementary observables: the modularity, the differential entropy of the eigenvector point cloud at two neighbourhood scales, and the overlap of the within- and between-community similarity histograms. On a synthetic benchmark with controlled mixture signal, all four metrics correctly identify the homogeneous case as null-compatible -- including the demanding regime of a dataset dominated by a single factor -- and exhibit a graded departure from the null as the cluster separation grows. Applied to 14 widely used psychometric scales, the pipeline isolates a small group of datasets supporting a genuine and directly interpretable modular structure, while the remaining scales fall either in a mixed-signal regime or in one compatible with a single homogeneous community. The significance analysis is independent of the specific community-detection algorithm and provides an operational way to test for modular subject-level structure in questionnaire data.