Classifying Functional Brain Graphs Using Graph Hypervector Representation

Hyperdimensional computing (HDC) has drawn significant attention due to its comparable performance with traditional machine learning techniques. HDC classifiers achieve high parallelism, consume less power, and are well-suited for edge applications. Encoding approaches such as record-based encoding and N-gram-based encoding have been used to generate features from input signals and images. These features are mapped to hypervectors and are input to HDC classifiers. This paper considers the group-based classification of graphs constructed from time series. The graph is encoded to a hypervector and the graph hypervectors are used to train the HDC classifier. This paper applies HDC to brain graph classification using fMRI data. Both the record-based encoding and GrapHD encoding are explored. Experimental results show that 1) For HDC encoding approaches, GrapHD encoding can achieve comparable classification performance and require significantly less memory storage compared to record-based encoding. 2) The utilization of sparsity can achieve higher performance as compared to fully connected brain graphs. Both threshold strategy and the minimum redundancy maximum relevance (mRMR) algorithm are employed to generate sub-graphs, where mRMR achieves higher performance for three binary classification problems: emotion vs. gambling, emotion vs. no-task, and gambling vs. no-task. The corresponding AUCs are 0.87, 0.88, and 0.88, respectively.