62G08 Nonparametric regression
Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging inherently involves noisy measurements and a severe multiple test
problem. Smoothing is usually used to reduce the effective number of multiple
comparisons and to locally integrate the signal and hence increase the
signal-to-noise ratio. Here, we provide a new structural adaptive segmentation
algorithm (AS)
that naturally combines the signal detection with noise reduction in one procedure.
Moreover, the new method
is closely related to a recently proposed structural adaptive smoothing
algorithm and preserves shape and spatial extent of activation areas without
blurring the borders.
Fitting multidimensional data using gradient penalties and the sparse grid combination technique
(2009)
Sparse grids, combined with gradient penalties provide an attractive tool for regularised least squares fitting. It has earlier been found that the combination technique, which builds a sparse grid function using a linear combination of approximations on partial grids, is here not as effective as it is in the case of elliptic partial differential equations. We argue that this is due to the irregular and random data distribution, as well as the proportion of the number of data to the grid resolution. These effects are investigated both in theory and experiments. As part of this investigation we also show how overfitting arises when the mesh size goes to zero. We conclude with a study of modified ``optimal'' combination coefficients who prevent the amplification of the sampling noise present while using the original combination coefficients.