Sparse brain network using penalized linear regression

Sparse partial correlation is a useful connectivity measure for brain networks when it is difficult to compute the exact partial correlation in the small-n large-p setting. In this paper, we formulate the problem of estimating partial correlation as a sparse linear regression with a l₁-norm penalty. The method is applied to brain network consisting of parcellated regions of interest (ROIs), which are obtained from FDG-PET images of the autism spectrum disorder (ASD) children and the pediatric control (PedCon) subjects. To validate the results, we check their reproducibilities of the obtained brain networks by the leave-one-out cross validation and compare the clustered structures derived from the brain networks of ASD and PedCon.