Fusing functional connectivity with network nodal information for sparse network pattern learning of functional brain networks

Sparse learning methods have been powerful tools for learning compact representations of functional brain networks consisting of a set of brain network nodes and a connectivity matrix measuring functional coherence between the nodes. However, these tools typically focus on the functional connectivity measures alone, ignoring the brain network nodal information that is complementary to the functional connectivity measures for comprehensively characterizing the functional brain networks. In order to provide a comprehensive delineation of the functional brain networks, we develop a new data fusion method for heterogeneous data, aiming at learning sparse network patterns to characterize both the functional connectivity measures and their complementary network nodal information within a unified framework. Experimental results have demonstrated that our method outperforms the best alternative method under comparison in terms of accuracy on simulated data as well as both reproducibility and prediction performance of brain age on real resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging data.