High-Accuracy Classification of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder with l2,1-Norm Linear Discriminant Analysis and Binary Hypothesis Testing

Abstract

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a high incidence of neurobehavioral disease in school-age children. Its neurobiological diagnosis (or classification) is meaningful for clinicians to give proper treatment for ADHD patients. The existing ADHD classification methods suffer from two problems, i.e., insufficient data and noise disturbance. In this paper, a high-accuracy classification method is proposed by using brain Functional Connectivity (FC) as ADHD features, where an l2,1-norm Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) model and a binary hypothesis testing framework are effectively employed. In detail, we introduce a binary hypothesis testing framework to cope with insufficient data of ADHD database. The FCs of test data (without seeing its label) are used for training and thus affect the subspace learning of training data under binary hypotheses. On other hand, the l2,1-norm LDA model generates a subspace to represent ADHD features, aiming to overcome noise disturbance. By robustly learning ADHD features, the subspace energy difference between binary hypotheses becomes more discriminative. Thereby, the true hypothesis can be rightly estimated with its larger subspace energy, which provides reliable evidence to predict the label of test data. By the test on ADHD-200 database, it shows that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods with the significant average accuracy of 97.6%. Moreover, the corresponding result analysis with ADHD symptom score and the explanation of discriminative FCs between ADHD and healthy control groups are given, which further verifies the validity of our classification method.