The Importance of Anti-Correlations in Graph Theory Based Classification of Autism Spectrum Disorder

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a significant growth in the number of applications of machine learning (ML) techniques to the study and identification of neurological disorders. These methods rely heavily on what features are made available to the ML algorithm. Features such as graph theoretical metrics of resting-state fMRI-based brain networks have proven useful. However, the computation of functional brain networks relies on making an arbitrary choice about whether the obtained anti-correlations, representing the strengths of functional connections in the brain, should be discarded or not. In this study, we examine how this choice affects the performance of a support vector machine (SVM) model for classifying autism spectrum disorder. We extracted graph theoretical features using three different pipelines for constructing the functional network graph. These pipelines primarily used positive weights, negative weights (anti-correlations) and only the absolute value of weights of the correlation matrix derived from fMRI time-series. Our results suggest that in the presence of Global Signal Regression (GSR) the features extracted from anti-correlations play a major role in improving model performance. However, this does not undermine the importance of features from other pipelines.