  Alzheimer's disease is a major cause of dementia. Its diagnosis requires
accurate biomarkers that are sensitive to disease stages. In this respect, we
regard probabilistic classification as a method of designing a probabilistic
biomarker for disease staging. Probabilistic biomarkers naturally support the
interpretation of decisions and evaluation of uncertainty associated with them.
In this paper, we obtain probabilistic biomarkers via Gaussian Processes.
Gaussian Processes enable probabilistic kernel machines that offer flexible
means to accomplish Multiple Kernel Learning. Exploiting this flexibility, we
propose a new variation of Automatic Relevance Determination and tackle the
challenges of high dimensionality through multiple kernels. Our research
results demonstrate that the Gaussian Process models are competitive with or
better than the well-known Support Vector Machine in terms of classification
performance even in the cases of single kernel learning. Extending the basic
scheme towards the Multiple Kernel Learning, we improve the efficacy of the
Gaussian Process models and their interpretability in terms of the known
anatomical correlates of the disease. For instance, the disease pathology
starts in and around the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex. Through the use of
Gaussian Processes and Multiple Kernel Learning, we have automatically and
efficiently determined those portions of neuroimaging data. In addition to
their interpretability, our Gaussian Process models are competitive with recent
deep learning solutions under similar settings.
