Data-driven Latent Graph Structure Learning for Diagnosis of Alzheimer's Syndrome

Complex systems often have a latent graph structure. Studying the underlying graph structure will help us to analyze the mechanisms of complex phenomena. However, it is a challenging problem to learn effective graph structures from the data and apply them to downstream tasks. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end graph learning approach for Alzheimer's syndrome diagnosis based on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data of brain regions, which is completely data-driven. The interactions between time-series of each brain region are represented as graph structures, and a multi-head attention mechanism is used to update the representations of the nodes. Then, the graph structures are obtained from the feature sampling of the edges. Finally, the learned graph structure is combined with the left-out time-series data features and the node prior to completing the classification task of the brain network. In comparison with the latest research methods, our approach achieves higher classification accuracy.