Work

Sequential pathway inference for multimodal neuroimaging analysis

Year: 2021

Type: article

Abstract: Motivated by a multimodal neuroimaging study for Alzheimer's disease, in this article, we study the inference problem, i.e., hypothesis testing, of sequential mediation analysis. The existing sequential mediation solutions mostly focus on sparse estimation, while hypothesis testing is an utterly different and more challenging problem. Meanwhile, the few mediation testing solutions often ignore the potential dependency among the mediators, or cannot be applied to the sequential problem directly. We propose a statistical inference procedure to test mediation pathways when there are sequentially ordered multiple data modalities and each modality involves multiple mediators. We allow the mediators to be conditionally dependent, and the number of mediators within each modality to diverge with the sample size. We produce the explicit significance quantification and establish the theoretical guarantees in terms of asymptotic size, power, and false discovery control. We demonstrate the efficacy of the method through both simulations and an application to a multimodal neuroimaging pathway analysis of Alzheimer's disease.

Source: Stat

DOI: 10.1002/sta4.433

Authors: Lexin Li, Chengchun Shi, Tengfei Guo, William J. Jagust

Institutions: University of California, Berkeley, London School of Economics and Political Science, Shenzhen Bay Laboratory

Language: English

Topic: Statistical Methods and Inference

Subfield: Statistics and Probability

Field: Mathematics

Domain: Physical Sciences

SDG: Good health and well-being

Open Access status: green

Funders: National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, National Institute on Aging