Continuous Dictionary of Nodes Model and Bilinear-Diffusion Representation Learning for Brain Disease Analysis

Brain networks based on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) provide a crucial perspective for diagnosing brain diseases. Representation learning has recently attracted tremendous attention due to its strong representation capability, which can be naturally applied to brain disease analysis. However, traditional representation learning only considers direct and local node interactions in original brain networks, posing challenges in constructing higher-order brain networks to represent indirect and extensive node interactions. To address this problem, we propose the Continuous Dictionary of Nodes model and Bilinear-Diffusion (CDON-BD) network for brain disease analysis. The CDON model is innovatively used to learn the original brain network, with its encoder weights directly regarded as latent features. To fully integrate latent features, we further utilize Bilinear Pooling to construct higher-order brain networks. The Diffusion Module is designed to capture extensive node interactions in higher-order brain networks. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, CDON-BD demonstrates competitive classification performance on two real datasets. Moreover, the higher-order representations learned by our method reveal brain regions relevant to the diseases, contributing to a better understanding of the pathology of brain diseases.