9,093 research outputs found
Synergetic and redundant information flow detected by unnormalized Granger causality: application to resting state fMRI
Objectives: We develop a framework for the analysis of synergy and redundancy
in the pattern of information flow between subsystems of a complex network.
Methods: The presence of redundancy and/or synergy in multivariate time series
data renders difficult to estimate the neat flow of information from each
driver variable to a given target. We show that adopting an unnormalized
definition of Granger causality one may put in evidence redundant multiplets of
variables influencing the target by maximizing the total Granger causality to a
given target, over all the possible partitions of the set of driving variables.
Consequently we introduce a pairwise index of synergy which is zero when two
independent sources additively influence the future state of the system,
differently from previous definitions of synergy. Results: We report the
application of the proposed approach to resting state fMRI data from the Human
Connectome Project, showing that redundant pairs of regions arise mainly due to
space contiguity and interhemispheric symmetry, whilst synergy occurs mainly
between non-homologous pairs of regions in opposite hemispheres. Conclusions:
Redundancy and synergy, in healthy resting brains, display characteristic
patterns, revealed by the proposed approach. Significance: The pairwise synergy
index, here introduced, maps the informational character of the system at hand
into a weighted complex network: the same approach can be applied to other
complex systems whose normal state corresponds to a balance between redundant
and synergetic circuits.Comment: 6 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1403.515
Learning to rank from medical imaging data
Medical images can be used to predict a clinical score coding for the
severity of a disease, a pain level or the complexity of a cognitive task. In
all these cases, the predicted variable has a natural order. While a standard
classifier discards this information, we would like to take it into account in
order to improve prediction performance. A standard linear regression does
model such information, however the linearity assumption is likely not be
satisfied when predicting from pixel intensities in an image. In this paper we
address these modeling challenges with a supervised learning procedure where
the model aims to order or rank images. We use a linear model for its
robustness in high dimension and its possible interpretation. We show on
simulations and two fMRI datasets that this approach is able to predict the
correct ordering on pairs of images, yielding higher prediction accuracy than
standard regression and multiclass classification techniques
Regularized brain reading with shrinkage and smoothing
Functional neuroimaging measures how the brain responds to complex stimuli.
However, sample sizes are modest, noise is substantial, and stimuli are high
dimensional. Hence, direct estimates are inherently imprecise and call for
regularization. We compare a suite of approaches which regularize via
shrinkage: ridge regression, the elastic net (a generalization of ridge
regression and the lasso), and a hierarchical Bayesian model based on small
area estimation (SAE). We contrast regularization with spatial smoothing and
combinations of smoothing and shrinkage. All methods are tested on functional
magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data from multiple subjects participating in
two different experiments related to reading, for both predicting neural
response to stimuli and decoding stimuli from responses. Interestingly, when
the regularization parameters are chosen by cross-validation independently for
every voxel, low/high regularization is chosen in voxels where the
classification accuracy is high/low, indicating that the regularization
intensity is a good tool for identification of relevant voxels for the
cognitive task. Surprisingly, all the regularization methods work about equally
well, suggesting that beating basic smoothing and shrinkage will take not only
clever methods, but also careful modeling.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/15-AOAS837 in the Annals of
Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
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