Regression Analyses of Distributions using Quantile Functional Regression

Radiomics involves the study of tumor images to identify quantitative markers explaining cancer heterogeneity. The predominant approach is to extract hundreds to thousands of image features, including histogram features comprised of summaries of the marginal distribution of pixel intensities, which leads to multiple testing problems and can miss out on insights not contained in the selected features. In this paper, we present methods to model the entire marginal distribution of pixel intensities via the quantile function as functional data, regressed on a set of demographic, clinical, and genetic predictors. We call this approach quantile functional regression, regressing subject-specific marginal distributions across repeated measurements on a set of covariates, allowing us to assess which covariates are associated with the distribution in a global sense, as well as to identify distributional features characterizing these differences, including mean, variance, skewness, and various upper and lower quantiles. To account for smoothness in the quantile functions, we introduce custom basis functions we call quantlets that are sparse, regularized, near-lossless, and empirically defined, adapting to the features of a given data set. We fit this model using a Bayesian framework that uses nonlinear shrinkage of quantlet coefficients to regularize the functional regression coefficients and provides fully Bayesian inference after fitting a Markov chain Monte Carlo. We demonstrate the benefit of the basis space modeling through simulation studies, and apply the method to Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) based radiomic dataset from Glioblastoma Multiforme to relate imaging-based quantile functions to demographic, clinical, and genetic predictors, finding specific differences in tumor pixel intensity distribution between males and females and between tumors with and without DDIT3 mutations.