Independent Filter Analysis for Group Discrimination in fMRI

Traditional group-level fMRI analysis approaches, such as Independent Component Analysis (ICA), often rely on unsupervised dimensionality reduction to map subjects into a common feature space. While effective for capturing common variance across all subjects, the preservation of discriminative features between groups of participants is not guaranteed. To address this limitation, we introduce Independent Filter Analysis (IFA), a supervised extension of group ICA that explicitly models group-discriminative information as part of the dimensionality reduction steps. Prior to unmixing, IFA constructs a subspace that simultaneously retains both shared and group-specific information, enhancing sensitivity to group effects while preserving biological interpretability. We validated IFA using simulated data and paired condition comparisons from three Human Connectome Project (HCP) tasks. In the simulation, IFA achieved 95% classification accuracy, outperforming group ICA, which failed to detect subtle group differences. On the HCP data, IFA increased network matrix classification accuracy by up to 15% and produced spatial maps that more precisely reflected task-relevant differences.