Bayesian hierarchical modeling on covariance valued data

Abstract

Analysis of structural and functional connectivity (FC) of human brains is of pivotal importance for diagnosis of cognitive ability. The Human Connectome Project (HCP) provides an excellent source of neural data across different regions of interest (ROIs) of the living human brain. Individual specific data were available in the form of time varying covariance matrices representing the brain activity as the subjects perform a specific task. As a preliminary objective of studying the heterogeneity of brain connectomics across the population, we develop a probabilistic model for a sample of covariance matrices using a scaled Wishart distribution. We stress here that our data units are available in the form of covariance matrices, and we use the Wishart distribution to create our likelihood function rather than its more common usage as a prior on covariance matrices. Based on empirical explorations suggesting the data matrices to have a low effective rank, we further model the center of the Wishart distribution using an orthogonal factor model type decomposition. We encourage shrinkage toward a low rank structure through a novel shrinkage prior and discuss strategies to sample from the posterior distribution using a combination of Gibbs and slice sampling. The efficacy of the approach is explored in various simulation settings and exemplified on several case studies including our motivating HCP data. We extend our modeling framework to a dynamic setting to detect change points.