Robustness of autoencoders for establishing psychometric properties based on small sample sizes: results from a Monte Carlo simulation study and a sports fan curiosity study

BACKGROUND: The principal component analysis (PCA) is known as a multivariate statistical model for reducing dimensions into a representation of principal components. Thus, the PCA is commonly adopted for establishing psychometric properties, i.e., the construct validity. Autoencoder is a neural network model, which has also been shown to perform well in dimensionality reduction. Although there are several ways the PCA and autoencoders could be compared for their differences, most of the recent literature focused on differences in image reconstruction, which are often sufficient for training data. In the current study, we looked at details of each autoencoder classifier and how they may provide neural network superiority that can better generalize non-normally distributed small datasets. METHODOLOGY: A Monte Carlo simulation was conducted, varying the levels of non-normality, sample sizes, and levels of communality. The performances of autoencoders and a PCA were compared using the mean square error, mean absolute value, and Euclidian distance. The feasibility of autoencoders with small sample sizes was examined. CONCLUSIONS: With extreme flexibility in decoding representation using linear and non-linear mapping, this study demonstrated that the autoencoder can robustly reduce dimensions, and hence was effective in building the construct validity with a sample size as small as 100. The autoencoders could obtain a smaller mean square error and small Euclidian distance between original dataset and predictions for a small non-normal dataset. Hence, when behavioral scientists attempt to explore the construct validity of a newly designed questionnaire, an autoencoder could also be considered an alternative to a PCA.