Unsupervised topological learning for atomic structures identification

We propose an unsupervised learning methodology build on a Gaussian mixture model computed on topological descriptors from persistent homology, for the structural analysis of materials at the atomic scale. Based only on atomic positions and without textit{a priori} knowledge, our method automatically identifies relevant local atomic structures in a system of interest. Along with a complete description of the procedure, we provide a concrete example of application by analysing large-scale molecular dynamics simulations of bulks crystal and liquid as well as homogeneous nucleation events of elemental Zr at the nose of the time-temperature-transformation curve. This method opens the way to deeper and autonomous studies of structural dependent phenomena occurring at the atomic scale in materials.

Unsupervised topological learning approach of crystal nucleation

Nucleation phenomena commonly observed in our every day life are of fundamental, technological and societal importance in many areas, but some of their most intimate mechanisms remain however to be unravelled. Crystal nucleation, the early stages where the liquid-to-solid transition occurs upon undercooling, initiates at the atomic level on nanometre length and sub-picoseconds time scales and involves complex multidimensional mechanisms with local symmetry breaking that can hardly be observed experimentally in the very details. To reveal their structural features in simulations without a priori, an unsupervised learning approach founded on topological descriptors loaned from persistent homology concepts is proposed. Applied here to monatomic metals, it shows that both translational and orientational ordering always come into play simultaneously when homogeneous nucleation starts in regions with low five-fold symmetry. It also reveals the specificity of the nucleation pathways depending on the element considered, with features beyond the hypothesis of Classical Nucleation Theory.

Entropy-based Discovery of Summary Causal Graphs in Time Series

We address in this study the problem of learning a summary causal graph on time series with potentially different sampling rates. To do so, we first propose a new temporal mutual information measure defined on a window-based representation of time series. We then show how this measure relates to an entropy reduction principle that can be seen as a special case of the Probabilistic Raising Principle. We finally combine these two ingredients in a PC-like algorithm to construct the summary causal graph. This algorithm is evaluated on several datasets that shows both its efficacy and efficiency.

Semi-supervised Wrapper Feature Selection by Modeling Imperfect Labels

In this paper, we propose a new wrapper feature selection approach with partially labeled training examples where unlabeled observations are pseudo-labeled using the predictions of an initial classifier trained on the labeled training set. The wrapper is composed of a genetic algorithm for proposing new feature subsets, and an evaluation measure for scoring the different feature subsets. The selection of feature subsets is done by assigning weights to characteristics and recursively eliminating those that are irrelevant. The selection criterion is based on a new multi-class $mathcal{C}$-bound that explicitly takes into account the mislabeling errors induced by the pseudo-labeling mechanism, using a probabilistic error model. Empirical results on different data sets show the effectiveness of our framework compared to several state-of-the-art semi-supervised feature selection approaches.

Uncertain Trees: Dealing with Uncertain Inputs in Regression Trees

Tree-based ensemble methods, as Random Forests and Gradient Boosted Trees, have been successfully used for regression in many applications and research studies. Furthermore, these methods have been extended in order to deal with uncertainty in the output variable, using for example a quantile loss in Random Forests (Meinshausen, 2006). To the best of our knowledge, no extension has been provided yet for dealing with uncertainties in the input variables, even though such uncertainties are common in practical situations. We propose here such an extension by showing how standard regression trees optimizing a quadratic loss can be adapted and learned while taking into account the uncertainties in the inputs. By doing so, one no longer assumes that an observation lies into a single region of the regression tree, but rather that it belongs to each region with a certain probability. Experiments conducted on several data sets illustrate the good behavior of the proposed extension.

Prediction regions through Inverse Regression

Predict a new response from a covariate is a challenging task in regression, which raises new question since the era of high-dimensional data. In this paper, we are interested in the inverse regression method from a theoretical viewpoint. Theoretical results have already been derived for the well-known linear model, but recently, the curse of dimensionality has increased the interest of practitioners and theoreticians into generalization of those results for various estimators, calibrated for the high-dimension context. To deal with high-dimensional data, inverse regression is used in this paper. It is known to be a reliable and efficient approach when the number of features exceeds the number of observations. Indeed, under some conditions, dealing with the inverse regression problem associated to a forward regression problem drastically reduces the number of parameters to estimate and make the problem tractable. When both the responses and the covariates are multivariate, estimators constructed by the inverse regression are studied in this paper, the main result being explicit asymptotic prediction regions for the response. The performances of the proposed estimators and prediction regions are also analyzed through a simulation study and compared with usual estimators.

Nonlinear network-based quantitative trait prediction from transcriptomic data

Quantitatively predicting phenotype variables by the expression changes in a set of candidate genes is of great interest in molecular biology but it is also a challenging task for several reasons. First, the collected biological observations might be heterogeneous and correspond to different biological mechanisms. Secondly, the gene expression variables used to predict the phenotype are potentially highly correlated since genes interact though unknown regulatory networks. In this paper, we present a novel approach designed to predict quantitative trait from transcriptomic data, taking into account the heterogeneity in biological samples and the hidden gene regulatory networks underlying different biological mechanisms. The proposed model performs well on prediction but it is also fully parametric, which facilitates the downstream biological interpretation. The model provides clusters of individuals based on the relation between gene expression data and the phenotype, and also leads to infer a gene regulatory network specific for each cluster of individuals. We perform numerical simulations to demonstrate that our model is competitive with other prediction models, and we demonstrate the predictive performance and the interpretability of our model to predict alcohol sensitivity from transcriptomic data on real data from Drosophila Melanogaster Genetic Reference Panel (DGRP).

Block-diagonal covariance selection for high-dimensional Gaussian graphical models

Gaussian graphical models are widely utilized to infer and visualize networks of dependencies between continuous variables. However, inferring the graph is difficult when the sample size is small compared to the number of variables. To reduce the number of parameters to estimate in the model, we propose a non-asymptotic model selection procedure supported by strong theoretical guarantees based on an oracle inequality and a minimax lower bound. The covariance matrix of the model is approximated by a block-diagonal matrix. The structure of this matrix is detected by thresholding the sample covariance matrix, where the threshold is selected using the slope heuristic. Based on the block-diagonal structure of the covariance matrix, the estimation problem is divided into several independent problems: subsequently, the network of dependencies between variables is inferred using the graphical lasso algorithm in each block. The performance of the procedure is illustrated on simulated data. An application to a real gene expression dataset with a limited sample size is also presented: the dimension reduction allows attention to be objectively focused on interactions among smaller subsets of genes, leading to a more parsimonious and interpretable modular network.

Clustering electricity consumers using high-dimensional regression mixture models

Massive informations about individual (household, small and medium enterprise) consumption are now provided with new metering technologies and the smart grid. Two major exploitations of these data are load profiling and forecasting at different scales on the grid. Customer segmentation based on load classification is a natural approach for these purposes. We propose here a new methodology based on mixture of high-dimensional regression models. The novelty of our approach is that we focus on uncovering classes or clusters corresponding to different regression models. As a consequence, these classes could then be exploited for profiling as well as forecasting in each class or for bottom-up forecasts in a unified view. We consider a real dataset of Irish individual consumers of 4,225 meters, each with 48 half-hourly meter reads per day over 1 year: from 1st January 2010 up to 31st December 2010, to demonstrate the feasibility of our approach.

Joint rank and variable selection for parsimonious estimation in a high-dimensional finite mixture regression model

We study a dimensionality reduction technique for finite mixtures of high-dimensional multivariate response regression models. Both the dimension of the response and the number of predictors are allowed to exceed the sample size. We consider predictor selection and rank reduction to obtain lower-dimensional approximations. A class of estimators with a fast rate of convergence is introduced. We apply this result to a specific procedure, introduced in [11], where the relevant predictors are selected by the Group-Lasso.