Ensembling Brain Regions for Brain Decoding

In this study, we propose a new method which ensembles the brain regions for brain decoding. The ensemble is generated by clustering the fMRI images recorded during an experimental set-up which measures the cognitive states associated to semantic categories. Initially, voxel clusters are formed by using hierarchical agglomerative clustering with correlation as the similarity metric. Then, for each voxel cluster, a support vector machine (SVM) classifier is trained to estimate the class-posteriori probabilities. Lastly, the class-posteriori probabilities are ensembled by concatenating them under the same feature space, which are then used to train a meta-layer SVM for the final classification of the cognitive states