A MapReduce Approach for Ridge Regression in Neuroimaging-Genetic Studies

International audience In order to understand the large between-subject variability observed in brain organization and assess factor risks of brain diseases, massive efforts have been made in the last few years to acquire high-dimensional neuroimaging and genetic data on large cohorts of subjects. The statistical analysis of such high-dimensional and complex data is carried out with increasingly sophisticated techniques and represents a great computational challenge. To be fully exploited, the concurrent increase of computational power then requires designing new parallel algorithms. The MapReduce framework coupled with efficient algorithms permits to deliver a scalable analysis tool that deals with high-dimensional data and hundreds of permutations in a few hours. On a real functional MRI dataset, this tool shows promising results.