Dynamic network model with continuous valued nodes for longitudinal brain morphometry

•To generate a dynamic brain network from longitudinal morphometric data.•Network generation from continuous valued high-dimensional short sequence data.•Use a bootstrap-enhanced LASSO to solve the network generation problem.

Longitudinal brain morphometry probes time-related brain morphometric patterns. We propose a method called dynamic network modeling with continuous valued nodes to generate a dynamic brain network from continuous valued longitudinal morphometric data. The mathematical framework of this method is based on state-space modeling. We use a bootstrap-enhanced least absolute shrinkage operator to solve the network-structure generation problem. In contrast to discrete dynamic Bayesian network modeling, the proposed method enables network generation directly from continuous valued high-dimensional short sequence data, being free from any discretization process. We applied the proposed method to a study of normal brain development.