Integrating automatic temporal relation graph into multi-task learning for Alzheimer’s disease progression prediction

Alzheimer’s disease (AD), the most prevalent dementia, gradually reduces the cognitive abilities of patients while also posing a significant financial burden on the health care system. A variety of multi-task learning methods have recently been proposed to identify potential MRI-related biomarkers and accurately predict the progression of AD. These methods, however, all use a predefined task relation structure that is rigid and insufficient to adequately capture the intricate temporal relations among tasks. Instead, we propose a novel mechanism for directly and automatically learning the temporal relation and constructing it as an Automatic Temporal relation Graph (AutoTG). We use the sparse group Lasso to select a universal MRI feature set for all tasks and particular sets for various tasks in order to find biomarkers that are useful for predicting the progression of AD. To solve the biconvex and nonsmooth objective function, we adopt the alternating optimization and show that the two related suboptimization problems are amenable to closed-form solution of the proximal operator. To solve the two problems efficiently, the accelerated proximal gradient method is used, which has the fastest convergence rate of first-order method. We have preprocessed two latest AD datasets, and the experimental results verify our proposed novel multi-task approach out performs several baseline methods. To demonstrate the high interpretability of our approach, we visualize the automatically learned temporal relation graph and investigate the temporal patterns of the important MRI features. The implementation source is at https://github.com/menghui-zhou/MAGPP.