Alzheimer’s Disease Diagnosis via Deep Factorization Machine Models

The current state-of-the-art deep neural networks (DNNs) for Alzheimer’s Diseasediagnosis use different biomarker combinations to classify patients, but do notallow extracting knowledge about the interactions of biomarkers. However, toimprove our understanding of the disease, it is paramount to extract suchknowledge from the learned model. In this paper, we propose a Deep Factorization Machine model that combines the ability of DNNs to learn complex relationships and the ease of interpretability of a linear model. The proposed model has three parts: (i) an embedding layer to deal with sparse categorical data, (ii) a Factorization Machine to efficiently learn pairwise interactions, and (iii) a DNN to implicitly model higher order interactions. In our experiments on data from the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative, we demonstrate that our proposed model classifies cognitive normal, mild cognitive impaired, and demented patients more accurately than competing models. In addition, we show that valuable knowledge about the interactions among biomarkers can be obtained.