Comparing Autoregressive and Network Features for Classification of Depression and Anxiety

Autocorrelation in functional MRI (fMRI) time series has been studied for decades, mostly considered as noise in the time series which is removed via prewhitening with an autoregressive model. Recent results suggest that the coefficients of an autoregressive model t to fMRI data may provide an indicator of underlying brain activity, suggesting that prewhitening could be removing important diagnostic information. This paper explores the explanatory value of these autoregressive features extracted from fMRI by considering the use of these features in a classification task. As a point of comparison, functional network based features are extracted from the same data and used in the same classification task. We find that in most cases, network based features provide better classification accuracy. However, using principal component analysis to combine network based features and autoregressive features for classification based on a support vector machine provides improved classification accuracy compared to single features or network features, suggesting that when properly combined there may be additional information to be gained from autoregressive features.