For multiple multivariate data sets, we derive conditions under which Generalized Canonical Correlation Analysis (GCCA) improves classification performance of the projected datasets, compared to standard Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) using only two data sets. We illustrate our theoretical results with simulations and a real data experiment.
Modern biomedical studies often collect multiple types of high-dimensional data on a common set of objects. A popular model for the joint analysis of multi-type datasets decomposes each data matrix into a low-rank common-variation matrix generated by latent factors shared across all datasets, a low-rank distinctive-variation matrix corresponding to each dataset, and an additive noise matrix. We propose decomposition-based generalized canonical correlation analysis (D-GCCA), a novel decomposition method that appropriately defines those matrices on the L2 space of random variables, whereas most existing methods are developed on its approximation, the Euclidean dot product space. Moreover to well calibrate common latent factors, we impose a desirable orthogonality constraint on distinctive latent factors. Existing methods inadequately consider such orthogonality and can thus suffer from substantial loss of undetected common variation. Our D-GCCA takes one step further than GCCA by separating common and distinctive variations among canonical variables, and enjoys an appealing interpretation from the perspective of principal component analysis. Consistent estimators of our common-variation and distinctive-variation matrices are established with good finite-sample numerical performance, and have closed-form expressions leading to efficient computation especially for large-scale datasets. The superiority of D-GCCA over state-of-the-art methods is also corroborated in simulations and real-world data examples.
We present Deep Generalized Canonical Correlation Analysis (DGCCA) -- a method for learning nonlinear transformations of arbitrarily many views of data, such that the resulting transformations are maximally informative of each other. While methods for nonlinear two-view representation learning (Deep CCA, (Andrew et al., 2013)) and linear many-view representation learning (Generalized CCA (Horst, 1961)) exist, DGCCA is the first CCA-style multiview representation learning technique that combines the flexibility of nonlinear (deep) representation learning with the statistical power of incorporating information from many independent sources, or views. We present the DGCCA formulation as well as an efficient stochastic optimization algorithm for solving it. We learn DGCCA representations on two distinct datasets for three downstream tasks: phonetic transcription from acoustic and articulatory measurements, and recommending hashtags and friends on a dataset of Twitter users. We find that DGCCA representations soundly beat existing methods at phonetic transcription and hashtag recommendation, and in general perform no worse than standard linear many-view techniques.
We propose novel first-order stochastic approximation algorithms for canonical correlation analysis (CCA). Algorithms presented are instances of inexact matrix stochastic gradient (MSG) and inexact matrix exponentiated gradient (MEG), and achieve $epsilon$-suboptimality in the population objective in $operatorname{poly}(frac{1}{epsilon})$ iterations. We also consider practical variants of the proposed algorithms and compare them with other methods for CCA both theoretically and empirically.
Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) is a statistical technique used to extract common information from multiple data sources or views. It has been used in various representation learning problems, such as dimensionality reduction, word embedding, and clustering. Recent work has given CCA probabilistic footing in a deep learning context and uses a variational lower bound for the data log likelihood to estimate model parameters. Alternatively, adversarial techniques have arisen in recent years as a powerful alternative to variational Bayesian methods in autoencoders. In this work, we explore straightforward adversarial alternatives to recent work in Deep Variational CCA (VCCA and VCCA-Private) we call ACCA and ACCA-Private and show how these approaches offer a stronger and more flexible way to match the approximate posteriors coming from encoders to much larger classes of priors than the VCCA and VCCA-Private models. This allows new priors for what constitutes a good representation, such as disentangling underlying factors of variation, to be more directly pursued. We offer further analysis on the multi-level disentangling properties of VCCA-Private and ACCA-Private through the use of a newly designed dataset we call Tangled MNIST. We also design a validation criteria for these models that is theoretically grounded, task-agnostic, and works well in practice. Lastly, we fill a minor research gap by deriving an additional variational lower bound for VCCA that allows the representation to use view-specific information from both input views.
This paper proposes a canonical-correlation-based filter method for feature selection. The sum of squared canonical correlation coefficients is adopted as the feature ranking criterion. The proposed method boosts the computational speed of the ranking criterion in greedy search. The supporting theorems developed for the feature selection method are fundamental to the understanding of the canonical correlation analysis. In empirical studies, a synthetic dataset is used to demonstrate the speed advantage of the proposed method, and eight real datasets are applied to show the effectiveness of the proposed feature ranking criterion in both classification and regression. The results show that the proposed method is considerably faster than the definition-based method, and the proposed ranking criterion is competitive compared with the seven mutual-information-based criteria.