Beyond Pairwise Connections: Extracting High-Order Functional Brain Network Structures under Global Constraints

Ling Zhan, Junjie Huang, Xiaoyao Yu, Wenyu Chen, Tao Jia

Keywords: functional brain networks, high-order interactions, graph structure learning, pairwise network modeling

TL;DR: We propose an end-to-end functional brain network structure learning framework to efficiently capture the high-order synchronizations of brain and strictly prove that this cannot be achieved by previous methods.

Abstract: Functional brain network (FBN) modeling often relies on local pairwise interactions, whose limitation in capturing high-order dependencies is theoretically analyzed in this paper. Meanwhile, the computational burden and heuristic nature of current hypergraph modeling approaches hinder end-to-end learning of FBN structures directly from data distributions. To address this, we propose to extract high-order FBN structures under global constraints, and implement this as a Global Constraints oriented Multi-resolution (GCM) FBN structure learning framework. It incorporates 4 types of global constraint (signal synchronization, subject identity, expected edge numbers, and data labels) to enable learning FBN structures for 4 distinct levels (sample/subject/group/project) of modeling resolution. Experimental results demonstrate that GCM achieves up to a 30.6% improvement in relative accuracy and a 96.3% reduction in computational time across 5 datasets and 2 task settings, compared to 9 baselines and 10 state-of-the-art methods. Extensive experiments validate the contributions of individual components and highlight the interpretability of GCM. This work offers a novel perspective on FBN structure learning and provides a foundation for interdisciplinary applications in cognitive neuroscience. Code is publicly available on https://github.com/lzhan94swu/GCM.

Primary Area: Neuroscience and cognitive science (e.g., neural coding, brain-computer interfaces)

Submission Number: 12729