H2G2-Net: A Hierarchical Heterogeneous Graph Generative Network Framework for Discovery of Multi-Modal Physiological Responses
This work addresses the challenge of analyzing cognitive states using physiological data for applications in human-computer interaction and healthcare, though it is incremental as it builds on existing graph neural network methods.
The paper tackles the problem of predicting cognitive states from multi-modal physiological signals by proposing H2G2-Net, a framework that automatically learns hierarchical heterogeneous graph structures without domain knowledge, achieving 5%-20% higher prediction accuracy than state-of-the-art GNNs on the CogPilot dataset.
Discovering human cognitive and emotional states using multi-modal physiological signals draws attention across various research applications. Physiological responses of the human body are influenced by human cognition and commonly used to analyze cognitive states. From a network science perspective, the interactions of these heterogeneous physiological modalities in a graph structure may provide insightful information to support prediction of cognitive states. However, there is no clue to derive exact connectivity between heterogeneous modalities and there exists a hierarchical structure of sub-modalities. Existing graph neural networks are designed to learn on non-hierarchical homogeneous graphs with pre-defined graph structures; they failed to learn from hierarchical, multi-modal physiological data without a pre-defined graph structure. To this end, we propose a hierarchical heterogeneous graph generative network (H2G2-Net) that automatically learns a graph structure without domain knowledge, as well as a powerful representation on the hierarchical heterogeneous graph in an end-to-end fashion. We validate the proposed method on the CogPilot dataset that consists of multi-modal physiological signals. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art GNNs by 5%-20% in prediction accuracy.