Entropic regression with neurologically motivated applications

The ultimate goal of cognitive neuroscience is to understand the mechanistic neural processes underlying the functional organization of the brain. The key to this study is understanding the structure of both the structural and functional connectivity between anatomical regions. In this paper, we use an information theoretic approach, which defines direct information flow in terms of causation entropy, to improve upon the accuracy of the recovery of the true network structure over popularly used methods for this task such as correlation and least absolute shrinkage and selection operator regression. The method outlined above is tested on synthetic data, which is produced by following previous work in which a simple dynamical model of the brain is used, simulated on top of a real network of anatomical brain regions reconstructed from diffusion tensor imaging. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the method of AlMomani et al. [Chaos 30, 013107 (2020)] when applied to data simulated on the realistic diffusion tensor imaging network, as well as on randomly generated small-world and Erdos–Renyi networks.