Attention-dependent modulation of cortical taste circuits revealed by granger causality with signal-dependent noise

We show, for the first time, that in cortical areas, for example the insular, orbitofrontal, and lateral prefrontal cortex, there is signal-dependent noise in the fMRI blood-oxygen level dependent (BOLD) time series, with the variance of the noise increasing approximately linearly with the square of the signal. Classical Granger causal models are based on autoregressive models with time invariant covariance structure, and thus do not take this signal-dependent noise into account. To address this limitation, here we describe a Granger causal model with signal-dependent noise, and a novel, likelihood ratio test for causal inferences. We apply this approach to the data from an fMRI study to investigate the source of the top-down attentional control of taste intensity and taste pleasantness processing. The Granger causality with signal-dependent noise analysis reveals effects not identified by classical Granger causal analysis. In particular, there is a top-down effect from the posterior lateral prefrontal cortex to the insular taste cortex during attention to intensity but not to pleasantness, and there is a top-down effect from the anterior and posterior lateral prefrontal cortex to the orbitofrontal cortex during attention to pleasantness but not to intensity. In addition, there is stronger forward effective connectivity from the insular taste cortex to the orbitofrontal cortex during attention to pleasantness than during attention to intensity. These findings indicate the importance of explicitly modeling signal-dependent noise in functional neuroimaging, and reveal some of the processes involved in a biased activation theory of selective attention

Efficient Scalable Accurate Regression Queries in In-DBMS Analytics

Recent trends aim to incorporate advanced data analytics capabilities within DBMSs. Linear regression queries are fundamental to exploratory analytics and predictive modeling. However, computing their exact answers leaves a lot to be desired in terms of efficiency and scalability. We contribute a novel predictive analytics model and associated regression query processing algorithms, which are efficient, scalable and accurate. We focus on predicting the answers to two key query types that reveal dependencies between the values of different attributes: (i) mean-value queries and (ii) multivariate linear regression queries, both within specific data subspaces defined based on the values of other attributes. Our algorithms achieve many orders of magnitude improvement in query processing efficiency and nearperfect approximations of the underlying relationships among data attributes

SCoRS - a method based on stability for feature selection and mapping in neuroimaging.

Feature selection (FS) methods play two important roles in the context of neuroimaging based classification: potentially increase classification accuracy by eliminating irrelevant features from the model and facilitate interpretation by identifying sets of meaningful features that best discriminate the classes. Although the development of FS techniques specifically tuned for neuroimaging data is an active area of research, up to date most of the studies have focused on finding a subset of features that maximizes accuracy. However, maximizing accuracy does not guarantee reliable interpretation as similar accuracies can be obtained from distinct sets of features. In the current paper we propose a new approach for selecting features: SCoRS (Survival Count on Random Subsamples) based on a recently proposed Stability Selection theory. SCoRS relies on the idea of choosing relevant features that are stable under data perturbation. Data are perturbed by iteratively subsampling both features (subspaces) and examples. We demonstrate the potential of the proposed method in a clinical application to classify depressed patients versus healthy individuals based on fMRI data acquired during visualization of happy faces

A group model for stable multi-subject ICA on fMRI datasets

Spatial Independent Component Analysis (ICA) is an increasingly used data-driven method to analyze functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data. To date, it has been used to extract sets of mutually correlated brain regions without prior information on the time course of these regions. Some of these sets of regions, interpreted as functional networks, have recently been used to provide markers of brain diseases and open the road to paradigm-free population comparisons. Such group studies raise the question of modeling subject variability within ICA: how can the patterns representative of a group be modeled and estimated via ICA for reliable inter-group comparisons? In this paper, we propose a hierarchical model for patterns in multi-subject fMRI datasets, akin to mixed-effect group models used in linear-model-based analysis. We introduce an estimation procedure, CanICA (Canonical ICA), based on i) probabilistic dimension reduction of the individual data, ii) canonical correlation analysis to identify a data subspace common to the group iii) ICA-based pattern extraction. In addition, we introduce a procedure based on cross-validation to quantify the stability of ICA patterns at the level of the group. We compare our method with state-of-the-art multi-subject fMRI ICA methods and show that the features extracted using our procedure are more reproducible at the group level on two datasets of 12 healthy controls: a resting-state and a functional localizer study