A Combined Deep Learning-Gradient Boosting Machine Framework for Fluid Intelligence Prediction

The ABCD Neurocognitive Prediction Challenge is a community driven competition asking competitors to develop algorithms to predict fluid intelligence score from T1-w MRIs. In this work, we propose a deep learning combined with gradient boosting machine framework to solve this task. We train a convolutional neural network to compress the high dimensional MRI data and learn meaningful image features by predicting the 123 continuous-valued derived data provided with each MRI. These extracted features are then used to train a gradient boosting machine that predicts the residualized fluid intelligence score. Our approach achieved mean square error (MSE) scores of 18.4374, 68.7868, and 96.1806 for the training, validation, and test set respectively.