Activation Discovery with FDR Control: Application to fMRI Data

Speaker: Zhaojun Wang (Nankai University)

Date: December 17 Fri. 9:00am

Venue: Tencent Meeting Room: 615 465 700     

Abstract: Data arriving in "streams" from a large number of sources is ubiquitous, a portion of which usually incurs structural changes during the time-course of data acquisition. For example, in fMRI analysis, some brain regions become active associated with task-related stimuli or even in resting-states. Such a region corresponds to an activated data stream. We are aiming to measure the uncertainty of discovering data streams in activation via the tool of the false discovery rate (FDR). Borrowing ideas from recent developments of the FDR control methodologies, we propose a simple yet effective method to achieve this purpose meanwhile taking unknown asynchronous change patterns and spatial dependence into consideration. Its validity on controlling the FDR is justified by asymptotic analysis. Numerical experiments indicate that the proposed method is both accurate and powerful. It is also applied in a real fMRI data analysis. A R package SLIP is developed to implement the proposed method.