Fig. 3

Nomothetic analyses based on all distance matrices from 255 depressed inpatients (see accompanying PDF). The scree plot displays the eigenvalues in a downward curve. The number of factors was determined using the elbow method (i.e., the point where the slope of the curve is leveling of; in our example, this is 5: after this point, the slope of the curve is nearly stable) (a). Ward’s (D2, i.e., general agglomerative hierarchical clustering procedure) clustering criterion on the weighted mean distance matrix from 255 patients (b). Distatis analysis: the PCA of the compromise matrix (i.e., weighted average of individual cross-product matrices) gives the position of the objects in the compromise space (c). Overview of the networks of HRSD-17 items for 255 patients (d)