Dynamic evidence fusion neural networks with uncertainty theory and its application in brain network analysis

Deep learning has demonstrated significant potential and advantages, achieving notable success in the medical field, particularly in the application of brain network analysis. However, most models ignore the uncertainty caused by inconsistent view quality and fail to effectively leverage the potential correlations and temporal sequences present in multi-view data, preventing neural networks from fully showcasing their strengths. To this end, this paper proposes dynamic evidence fusion neural networks (DEF-NNs) with uncertainty theory, and applies it to brain network analysis. Our model is established within a multi-view learning framework that considers the functional connections under each window as a view. We employ a dynamic evidence learning module to capture the evidence for each time window of the dynamic brain network, utilizing three distinct convolutional filters to extract feature maps. Then, a dynamic evidence fusion mechanism is designed and a dynamic trust function is constructed according to the temporal nature of dFC data. The evidence generated by multiple windows is fused at the decision level of classification, dealing with the uncertainty caused by inconsistent view quality and improving the classification performance. We verified the effectiveness of DEF-NNs through comparison with advanced algorithms on three schizophrenia datasets, and the results show that DEF-NNs significantly improved the classification performance of brain disease diagnosis tasks.