Feature selection framework for functional connectome fingerprinting

The ability to uniquely characterize individual subjects based on their functional connectome (FC) is a key requirement for progress toward precision psychiatry. FC fingerprinting is increasingly studied in the neuroimaging community for this purpose, where a variety of approaches have been developed for effective FC fingerprinting. Recent independent studies showed that fingerprinting accuracy suffers at large sample sizes and when coarser parcellations are used for computing the FC. Quantifying this problem and understanding the reasons these factors impact fingerprinting accuracy is crucial to develop more accurate fingerprinting methods for large sample sizes. Part of the challenge in fingerprinting is that FC captures both generic and subject‐specific information. A systematic approach for identifying subject‐specific FC information is crucial for making progress in addressing the fingerprinting problem. In this study, we addressed three gaps in our understanding of the FC fingerprinting problem. First, we studied the joint effect of sample size and parcellation granularity. Second, we explained the reason for reduced fingerprinting accuracy with increased sample size and reduced parcellation granularity. To this end, we used a clustering quality metric from the data mining community. Third, we developed a general feature selection framework for systematically identifying resting‐state functional connectivity (RSFC) elements that capture information to uniquely identify subjects. In sum, we evaluated six different approaches from this framework by quantifying both subject‐specific fingerprinting accuracy and the decrease in accuracy with an increase in sample size to identify which approach improved quality metrics the most.