Scalar on network regression via boosting

Abstract

Neuroimaging studies have a growing interest in learning the association between the individual brain connectivity networks and their clinical characteristics. It is also of great interest to identify the sub-brain networks as biomarkers to predict the clinical symptoms, such as disease status, potentially providing insight on neuropathology. This motivates the need for developing a new type of regression model where the response variable is scalar, and predictors are networks that are typically represented as adjacent matrices or weighted adjacent matrices to which we refer as scalar-on-network regression. In this work we develop a new boosting method for model fitting with subnetwork markers selection. Our approach, as opposed to group lasso or other existing regularization methods, is, essentially, a gradient descent algorithm leveraging known network structure. We demonstrate the utility of our methods via simulation studies and analysis of the resting-state fMRI data in a cognitive developmental cohort study.