Self-weighted adaptive structure learning for ASD diagnosis via multi-template multi-center representation

As a kind of neurodevelopmental disease, autism spectrum disorder (ASD) can cause severe social, communication, interaction, and behavioral challenges. To date, many imaging-based machine learning techniques have been proposed to address ASD diagnosis issues. However, most of these techniques are restricted to a single template or dataset from one imaging center. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-template multi-center ensemble classification scheme for automatic ASD diagnosis. Specifically, based on different pre-defined templates, we construct multiple functional connectivity (FC) brain networks for each subject based on our proposed Pearson's correlation-based sparse low-rank representation. After extracting features from these FC networks, informative features to learn optimal similarity matrix are then selected by our self-weighted adaptive structure learning (SASL) model. For each template, the SASL method automatically assigns an optimal weight learned from the structural information without additional weights and parameters. Finally, an ensemble strategy based on the multi- template multi-center representations is applied to derive the final diagnosis results. Extensive experiments are conducted on the publicly available Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange (ABIDE) database to demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed method. Experimental results verify that our proposed method boosts ASD diagnosis performance and outperforms state-of-the-art methods.