Algorithms to understand default brain function
Dept. of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, RWTH Aachen University
One of the least expected findings from systems neuroscience is the "Default Mode Network". This macroscopical brain network has the highest metabolic consumption and the perhaps highest neuronal baseline activity. Functional processing in this network is associated with diverse human-defining psychological processes: complex social cognition, such as perspective-taking, language and moral judgment, as well as the imagination of events and places in future and past. At the same time, the default-mode network has been linked to a range of psychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia, autism and depression. Despite its anthropological significance, the (patho-)physiological function of this network remains essentially unknown. The alternative quantitative approaches into investigating the biology of the DMN will include semisupervised factored logistic regression, extended autoencoder architectures including L1 penalization, hierarchical tree sparsity for regularized high-dimensional prediction, transfer learning in multi-output deep models, and canonical correlation analysis with bootstrapped sensitivity analysis.