Alzheimer's Disease Diagnosis via Intuitionistic Fuzzy Random Vector Functional Link Network

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a prominent neurodegenerative disorder, which leads to memory loss and cognitive impairment. The progression is irreversible and shows atrophies in cerebral cortex. Multiple studies revealed that the early diagnosis and early treatment can slow the progress of dementia, and hence, further atrophies can be controlled. Brain imaging data, such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), have been prominently used for the diagnosis of AD. Multiple approaches have been proposed for the diagnosis of AD. We propose a novel intuitionistic fuzzy random vector functional link network (IFRVFL) for the diagnosis of AD. Unlike standard random vector functional link (RVFL) network, extreme learning machine (ELM), and kernel ridge regression (KRR), which uses a uniform weighting approach for generating the optimal classifier, the proposed IFRVFL uses a fuzzy weighted approach for generating the optimal classifier. A uniform weighting scheme assumes that all the data samples are equally important; however, in real-world scenarios, this assumption may not hold true due to the presence of outliers and noise. Hence, it results in lower generalization. The proposed IFRVFL assigns each sample an intuitionistic fuzzy number (IFN), which is a function of membership and nonmembership score of a sample. The membership score is a function of the sample distance from the centroid of its corresponding class and the nonmembership score is a function of sample distance from the centroid as well as the neighborhood of the given sample. The proposed IFRVFL effectively reduces the influence of outliers. To evaluate the efficiency of the proposed IFRVFL model, we employed it for the diagnosis of AD. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed IFRVFL model is superior in mild cognitive impairment (MCI) versus AD case. Thus, IFRVFL can be used in the clinical setting for the early diagnosis of AD. Furthermore, to check the robustness of the proposed IFRVFL model, we also evaluated it on benchmark datasets. Experimental results and the statistical tests reveal that the proposed IFRVFL is better in comparison to baseline models. The source code of the proposed IFRVFL formulation is available at https://github.com/mtanveer1/ .