Bayesian interaction selection model for multimodal neuroimaging data analysis

Multimodality or multiconstruct data arise increasingly in functional neuroimaging studies to characterize brain activity under different cognitive states. Relying on those high‐resolution imaging collections, it is of great interest to identify predictive imaging markers and intermodality interactions with respect to behavior outcomes. Currently, most of the existing variable selection models do not consider predictive effects from interactions, and the desired higher‐order terms can only be included in the predictive mechanism following a two‐step procedure, suffering from potential misspecification. In this paper, we propose a unified Bayesian prior model to simultaneously identify main effect features and intermodality interactions within the same inference platform in the presence of high‐dimensional data. To accommodate the brain topological information and correlation between modalities, our prior is designed by compiling the intermediate selection status of sequential partitions in light of the data structure and brain anatomical architecture, so that we can improve posterior inference and enhance biological plausibility. Through extensive simulations, we show the superiority of our approach in main and interaction effects selection, and prediction under multimodality data. Applying the method to the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study, we characterize the brain functional underpinnings with respect to general cognitive ability under different memory load conditions.