Disentangled and Proportional Representation Learning for Multi-view Brain Connectomes

Abstract

Diffusion MRI-derived brain structural connectomes or brain networks are widely used in the brain research. However, constructing brain networks is highly dependent on various tractography algorithms, which leads to difficulties in deciding the optimal view concerning the downstream analysis. In this paper, we propose to learn a unified representation from multi-view brain networks. Particularly, we expect the learned representations to convey the information from different views fairly and in a disentangled sense. We achieve the disentanglement via an approach using unsupervised variational graph auto-encoders. We achieve the view-wise fairness, i.e. proportionality, via an alternative training routine. More specifically, we construct an analogy between training the deep network and the network flow problem. Based on the analogy, the fair representations learning is attained via a network scheduling algorithm aware of proportionality. The experimental results demonstrate that the learned representations fit various downstream tasks well. They also show that the proposed approach effectively preserves the proportionality.