ADHD classification by dual subspace learning using resting-state functional connectivity

•We use a subspace learning model to form two subspaces to separate ADHD components from healthy control ones.•Several subspace measures are employed as kernels to enhance the component clustering performance.•A novel ADHD classification framework is given via using a binary hypothesis testing of test data.•The features of training data are generated by using the functional connectivity of test data with its label hypothesis.•The projected feature energies of training data are compared under binary hypotheses to predict ADHD subjects. As one of the most common neurobehavioral diseases in school-age children, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) has been increasingly studied in recent years. But it is still a challenge problem to accurately identify ADHD patients from healthy persons. To address this issue, we propose a dual subspace classification algorithm by using individual resting-state Functional Connectivity (FC). In detail, two subspaces respectively containing ADHD and healthy control features, called as dual subspaces, are learned with several subspace measures, wherein a modified graph embedding measure is employed to enhance the intra-class relationship of these features. Therefore, given a subject (used as test data) with its FCs, the basic classification principle is to compare its projected component energy of FCs on each subspace and then predict the ADHD or control label according to the subspace with larger energy. However, this principle in practice works with low efficiency, since the dual subspaces are unstably obtained from ADHD databases of small size. Thereby, we present an ADHD classification framework by a binary hypothesis testing of test data. Here, the FCs of test data with its ADHD or control label hypothesis are employed in the discriminative FC selection of training data to promote the stability of dual subspaces. For each hypothesis, the dual subspaces are learned from the selected FCs of training data. The total projected energy of these FCs is also calculated on the subspaces. Sequentially, the energy comparison is carried out under the binary hypotheses. The ADHD or control label is finally predicted for test data with the hypothesis of larger total energy. In the experiments on ADHD-200 dataset, our method achieves a significant classification performance compared with several state-of-the-art machine learning and deep learning methods, where our accuracy is about 90 % for most of ADHD databases in the leave-o