Describing High-Order Statistical Dependence Using "Concurrence Topology", with Application to Functional MRI Brain Data

TL;DR

This paper introduces 'concurrence topology', a nonparametric method for analyzing high-order dependence in multivariate binary data, demonstrated on fMRI data to reveal group differences in brain connectivity.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel topological approach to describe high-order dependence in multivariate data, scalable to dozens of variables, with application to brain fMRI data.

Findings

Detected group differences in brain connectivity topology.

Applied method to ADHD and control fMRI data.

Showed feasibility of high-order dependence analysis.

Abstract

For multivariate data, dependence beyond pair-wise can be important. This is true, for example, in using functional MRI (fMRI) data to investigate brain functional connectivity. When one has more than a few variables, however, the number of simple summaries of even third-order dependence can be unmanageably large. "Concurrence topology" is an apparently new nonparametric method for describing high-order dependence among up to dozens of dichotomous variables (e.g., seventh-order dependence in 32 variables). This method generally produces summaries of $p^{th}$-order dependence of manageable size no matter how big $p$ is. (But computing time can be lengthy.) For time series, this method can be applied in both the time and Fourier domains. Write each observation as a vector of 0's and 1's. A "concurrence" is a group of variables all "1" in the same observation. The collection of concurrences can be represented as a sequence of shapes ("filtration"). Holes in the filtration indicate weak or negative association among the variables. The pattern of the holes in the filtration can be analyzed using computational topology. This method is demonstrated on dichotomized fMRI data. The dataset includes subjects diagnosed with ADHD and healthy controls. In an exploratory analysis numerous group differences in the topology of the filtrations are found.