Biostatistics Weekly Seminar


Modeling Region-Referenced Longitudinal Functional Electroencephalography Data

Aaron Scheffler, PhD
University of California, Los Angeles

Highly structured data collected in a variety of biomedical applications such as electroencephalography (EEG) are discrete samples of a smooth functional process observed across both temporal and spatial dimensions. More specifically, I consider EEG data as region-referenced longitudinal functional data in which the functional dimension captures local signal dynamics, the longitudinal dimension tracks changes over the course of an experiment, and the regional dimension indexes spatial information across electrodes on the scalp. This complex data structure exhibits intricate dependencies with rich information but its dimensionality and size produce significant obstacles for interpretation, estimation, and inference. Motivated by a series of EEG studies in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), I present a set of computationally efficient methods for these high-dimensional data structures that both maintain information along each dimension and yield interpretable components and inferences.

In the first half of my talk, I introduce a hybrid principal components analysis (HPCA) for region-referenced longitudinal functional EEG data, which utilizes both vector and functional principal components analyses and does not collapse information along any of the three dimensions of the data. The HPCA decomposition only assumes weak separability of the higher-dimensional covariance process and utilizes a product of one dimensional eigenvectors and eigenfunctions, obtained from the regional, functional, and longitudinal marginal covariances, to represent the observed data, providing a computationally feasible non-parametric approach. Model components are estimated via a mixed effects framework and form the basis of a bootstrap test for group level inference. In the second half of my talk, I present a covariate-adjusted region-referenced generalized functional linear model (CARR-GFLM) for modeling scalar outcomes from region-referenced functional predictors. CARR-GFLM utilizes a tensor basis formed from one-dimensional discrete and continuous bases to estimate functional effects across a discrete regional domain while simultaneously adjusting for additional non-functional covariates, such as age. Proposed methods not only help identify neurodevelopmental differences between typically developing and ASD children but can also be used to study the heterogeneity within children with ASD.


MRBIII, Room 1220
16 January 2019
1:30pm


Speaker Itinerary

Topic revision: r3 - 10 Jan 2019, JonathanSchildcrout
 

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