Alexander P. Christensen

Sean H. Merritt, Alexander P. Christensen

Developing interpretable machine learning models has become an increasingly important issue. One way in which data scientists have been able to develop interpretable models has been to use dimension reduction techniques. In this paper, we examine several dimension reduction techniques including two recent approaches developed in the network psychometrics literature called exploratory graph analysis (EGA) and unique variable analysis (UVA). We compared EGA and UVA with two other dimension reduction techniques common in the machine learning literature (principal component analysis and independent component analysis) as well as no reduction to the variables real data. We show that EGA and UVA perform as well as the other reduction techniques or no reduction. Consistent with previous literature, we show that dimension reduction can decrease, increase, or provide the same accuracy as no reduction of variables. Our tentative results find that dimension reduction tends to lead to better performance when used for classification tasks.

Lara Russell-Lasalandra, Hudson Golino, Luis Eduardo Garrido et al.

Psychological scale development has traditionally required extensive expert involvement, iterative revision, and large-scale pilot testing before psychometric evaluation can begin. The `AIGENIE` R package implements the AI-GENIE framework (Automatic Item Generation with Network-Integrated Evaluation), which integrates large language model (LLM) text generation with network psychometric methods to automate the early stages of this process. The package generates candidate item pools using LLMs, transforms them into high-dimensional embeddings, and applies a multi-step reduction pipeline -- Exploratory Graph Analysis (EGA), Unique Variable Analysis (UVA), and bootstrap EGA -- to produce structurally validated item pools entirely *in silico*. This tutorial introduces the package across six parts: installation and setup, understanding Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), text generation, item generation, the `AIGENIE` function, and the `GENIE` function. Two running examples illustrate the package's use: the Big Five personality model (a well-established construct) and AI Anxiety (an emerging construct). The package supports multiple LLM providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Groq, HuggingFace, and local models), offers a fully offline mode with no external API calls, and provides the `GENIE()` function for researchers who wish to apply the psychometric reduction pipeline to existing item pools regardless of their origin. The `AIGENIE` package is freely available on R-universe at https://laralee.r-universe.dev/AIGENIE.