Novel Effective Connectivity Network Inference for MCI Identification.

Inferring effective brain connectivity network is a challenging task owing to perplexing noise effects, the curse of dimensionality, and inter-subject variability. However, most existing network inference methods are based on correlation analysis and consider the datum points individually, revealing limited information of the neuron interactions and ignoring the relations amongst the derivatives of the data. Hence, we proposed a novel ultra group-constrained sparse linear regression model for effective connectivity inference. This model utilizes not only the discrepancy between observed signals and the model prediction, but also the discrepancy between the associated weak derivatives of the observed and the model signals for a more accurate effective connectivity inference. What's more, a group constraint is applied to minimize the inter-subject variability and the proposed modeling was validated on a mild cognitive impairment dataset with superior results achieved.