Multi-Modal Multi-Kernel Graph Learning for Autism Prediction and Biomarker Discovery

Graph learning-based multi-modal integration and classification is one of the most challenging tasks for disease prediction. To effectively offset the negative impact among modalities in the process of multi-modal integration and heterogeneous information extractions from graphs, we propose a novel method called Multi-modal Multi-Kernel Graph Learning (MMKGL). To solve the problem of negative impact among modalities, we propose a multi-modal graph embedding module to construct a multi-modal graph. Different from conventional methods that manually construct static graphs for all modalities, each modality generates a separate graph by adaptive learning, where a function graph and a supervision graph are introduced for optimization during the multi-graph fusion embedding process. We then propose a multi-kernel graph learning module to extract heterogeneous information from the multi-modal graph. The information in the multi-modal graph at different levels is aggregated by convolutional kernels with different receptive field sizes, followed by generating a cross-kernel discovery tensor for disease prediction. Our method is evaluated on the benchmark Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange (ABIDE) dataset and outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. In addition, discriminative brain regions associated with autism are identified by our model, providing guidance for the study of autism pathology.