{"paper":{"title":"Time-Averaged Drift Approximations are Inconsistent for Inference in Drift Diffusion Models","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["stat.AP","stat.CO"],"primary_cat":"stat.ME","authors_text":"Alexander Fengler, Matthew T. Harrison, Michael J. Frank, Sicheng Liu","submitted_at":"2025-12-11T03:18:55Z","abstract_excerpt":"Drift diffusion models (DDMs) have found widespread use in computational neuroscience, cognitive science, mathematical psychology as well as other fields. They model evidence accumulation in simple decision tasks as a stochastic process drifting towards decision barriers. In models where the drift is both time-varying within a trial and variable across trials, the high computational cost for accurate likelihood evaluation has often led to the use of a computationally convenient surrogate for parameter inference, the time-averaged drift approximation (TADA). In each trial, TADA assumes that the"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2512.10250","kind":"arxiv","version":2},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2512.10250/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}