# MRC-GAT: A Meta-Relational Copula-Based Graph Attention Network for Interpretable Multimodal Alzheimer's Disease Diagnosis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.15740 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.15740/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Feb 2026.

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

- [A Survey on Oversmoothing in Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10993/) (2023)
- [Demystifying Oversmoothing in Attention-Based Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16102/) (2023)
- [Spectral Graph Convolutions for Population-based Disease Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03020/) (2017)
- [InceptionGCN: Receptive Field Aware Graph Convolutional Network for Disease Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.04233/) (2019)
- [Deep ROC Analysis and AUC as Balanced Average Accuracy to Improve Model Selection, Understanding and Interpretation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11357/) (2021)
- [Cascaded Multi-Modal Mixing Transformers for Alzheimer's Disease Classification with Incomplete Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.00255/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised pre-training of graph transformers on patient population graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10603/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative condition necessitating early and precise diagnosis to provide prompt clinical management. Given the paramount importance of early diagnosis, recent studies have increasingly focused on computer-aided diagnostic models to enhance precision and reliability. However, most graph-based approaches still rely on fixed structural designs, which restrict their flexibility and limit generalization across heterogeneous patient data. To overcome these limitations, the Meta-Relational Copula-Based Graph Attention Network (MRC-GAT) is proposed as an efficient multimodal model for AD classification tasks. The proposed architecture, copula-based similarity alignment, relational attention, and node fusion are integrated as the core components of episodic meta-learning, such that the multimodal features, including risk factors (RF), Cognitive test scores, and MRI attributes, are first aligned via a copula-based transformation in a common statistical space and then combined by a multi-relational attention mechanism. According to evaluations performed on the TADPOLE and NACC datasets, the MRC-GAT model achieved accuracies of 96.87% and 92.31%, respectively, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance compared to existing diagnostic models. Finally, the proposed model confirms the robustness and applicability of the proposed method by providing interpretability at various stages of disease diagnosis.