Discriminative Structured Feature Engineering for Macroscale Brain Connectomes

Neuroimaging techniques can measure structural and functional brain connectivity with unprecedented detail in vivo. This so-called brain connectome can be represented as high dimensional matrices corresponding to edge weights in graphs. After measuring the matrices of two cohorts (i.e., patients and healthy controls), one is often required to formulate computational network models for effective feature engineering to draw discriminative distinctions between the cohorts, as well as estimate the associated statistical significance. We designed a novel method to reveal the intrinsic features of functional matrices of discriminative power for group comparison. More specifically, by encouraging co-selection of edges connected to the same node, we preserved the discriminative edges to maximum extent. To reduce the false positive rate of the extracted discriminative edges, an optimization procedure was developed to evaluate the significance of these edges and remove trivial ones. We validated the proposed method using both synthetic data and real benchmarks, and compared it to regularized logistic regression, univariate t-test and stability selection. The experimental results clearly showed that the proposed approach outperformed the three competing methods under various settings. In addition to increasing the F-measure of feature selection, our approach captured the endogenous, discriminative connectivity patterns consistent with recent findings in biomedical literature. This data-driven method paves a new avenue of enquiry into the inherent nature of network models for functional brain connectomes.