# Interpretable Fusion Analytics Framework for fMRI Connectivity: Self-Attention Mechanism and Latent Space Item-Response Model

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.01581 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01581/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 69 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Jul 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.02754/) (2016)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [UMAP: Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection for Dimension Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03426/) (2018)
- [An introduction to Topological Data Analysis: fundamental and practical aspects for data scientists](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.04019/) (2017)
- [PointGrow: Autoregressively Learned Point Cloud Generation with Self-Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.05591/) (2018)
- [Uniformizing Techniques to Process CT scans with 3D CNNs for Tuberculosis Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.13224/) (2020)
- [Mapping unobserved item-respondent interactions: A latent space item response model with interaction map](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08719/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

There have been several attempts to use deep learning based on brain fMRI signals to classify cognitive impairment diseases. However, deep learning is a hidden black box model that makes it difficult to interpret the process of classification. To address this issue, we propose a novel analytical framework that interprets the classification result from deep learning processes. We first derive the region of interest (ROI) functional connectivity network (FCN) by embedding functions based on their similar signal patterns. Then, using the self-attention equipped deep learning model, we classify diseases based on their FCN. Finally, in order to interpret the classification results, we employ a latent space item-response interaction network model to identify the significant functions that exhibit distinct connectivity patterns when compared to other diseases. The application of this proposed framework to the four types of cognitive impairment shows that our approach is valid for determining the significant ROI functions.