Feature selection using genetic algorithm for classification of schizophrenia using fMRI data

In this paper we propose a new method for classification of subjects into schizophrenia and control groups using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data. In the preprocessing step, the number of fMRI time points is reduced using principal component analysis (PCA). Then, independent component analysis (ICA) is used for further data analysis. It estimates independent components (ICs) of PCA results. For feature extraction, local binary patterns (LBP) technique is applied on the ICs. It transforms the ICs into spatial histograms of LBP values. For feature selection, genetic algorithm (GA) is used to obtain a set of features with large discrimination power. In the next step of feature selection, linear discriminant analysis (LDA) is applied to further extract features that maximize the ratio of between-class and within-class variability. Finally, a test subject is classified into schizophrenia or control group using a Euclidean distance based classifier and a majority vote method. In this paper, a leave-one-out cross validation method is used for performance evaluation. Experimental results prove that the proposed method has an acceptable accuracy.