Robust Dimension Reduction for Clustering With Local Adaptive Learning

Deciphering the Feature Representation of Deep Neural Networks for High-Performance AI

AI driven by deep learning is transforming many aspects of science and technology. The enormous success of deep learning stems from its unique capability of extracting essential features from Big Data for decision-making. However, the feature extraction and hidden representations in deep neural networks (DNNs) remain inexplicable, primarily because of lack of technical tools to comprehend and interrogate the feature space data. The main hurdle here is that the feature data are often noisy in nature, complex in structure, and huge in size and dimensionality, making it intractable for existing techniques to analyze the data reliably. In this work, we develop a computational framework named contrastive feature analysis (CFA) to facilitate the exploration of the DNN feature space and improve the performance of AI. By utilizing the interaction relations among the features and incorporating a novel data-driven kernel formation strategy into the feature analysis pipeline, CFA mitigates the limitations of traditional approaches and provides an urgently needed solution for the analysis of feature space data. The technique allows feature data exploration in unsupervised, semi-supervised and supervised formats to address different needs of downstream applications. The potential of CFA and its applications for pruning of neural network architectures are demonstrated using several state-of-the-art networks and well-annotated datasets across different disciplines.

Flexible Multiview Spectral Clustering With Self-Adaptation

Multiview spectral clustering (MVSC) has achieved state-of-the-art clustering performance on multiview data. Most existing approaches first simply concatenate multiview features or combine multiple view-specific graphs to construct a unified fusion graph and then perform spectral embedding and cluster label discretization with k -means to obtain the final clustering results. They suffer from an important drawback: all views are treated as fixed when fusing multiple graphs and equal when handling the out-of-sample extension. They cannot adaptively differentiate the discriminative capabilities of multiview features. To alleviate these problems, we propose a flexible MVSC with self-adaptation (FMSCS) method in this article. A self-adaptive learning scheme is designed for structured graph construction, multiview graph fusion, and out-of-sample extension. Specifically, we learn a fusion graph with a desirable clustering structure by adaptively exploiting the complementarity of different view features under the guidance of a proper rank constraint. Meanwhile, we flexibly learn multiple projection matrices to handle the out-of-sample extension by adaptively adjusting the view combination weights according to the specific contents of unseen data. Finally, we derive an alternate optimization strategy that guarantees desirable convergence to iteratively solve the formulated unified learning model. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method compared with state-of-the-art MVSC approaches. For the purpose of reproducibility, we provide the code and testing datasets at https://github.com/shidan0122/FMICS.

Unsupervised Adaptive Embedding for Dimensionality Reduction

High-dimensional data are highly correlative and redundant, making it difficult to explore and analyze. Amount of unsupervised dimensionality reduction (DR) methods has been proposed, in which constructing a neighborhood graph is the primary step of DR methods. However, there exist two problems: 1) the construction of graph is usually separate from the selection of projection direction and 2) the original data are inevitably noisy. In this article, we propose an unsupervised adaptive embedding (UAE) method for DR to solve these challenges, which is a linear graph-embedding method. First, an adaptive allocation method of neighbors is proposed to construct the affinity graph. Second, the construction of affinity graph and calculation of projection matrix are integrated together. It considers the local relationship between samples and global characteristic of high-dimensional data, in which the cleaned data matrix is originally proposed to remove noise in subspace. The relationship between our method and local preserving projections (LPPs) is also explored. Finally, an alternative iteration optimization algorithm is derived to solve our model, the convergence and computational complexity of which are also analyzed. Comprehensive experiments on synthetic and benchmark datasets illustrate the superiority of our method.

Fast Self-Supervised Clustering With Anchor Graph

Benefit from avoiding the utilization of labeled samples, which are usually insufficient in the real world, unsupervised learning has been regarded as a speedy and powerful strategy on clustering tasks. However, clustering directly from primal data sets leads to high computational cost, which limits its application on large-scale and high-dimensional problems. Recently, anchor-based theories are proposed to partly mitigate this problem and field naturally sparse affinity matrix, while it is still a challenge to get excellent performance along with high efficiency. To dispose of this issue, we first presented a fast semisupervised framework (FSSF) combined with a balanced K -means-based hierarchical K -means (BKHK) method and the bipartite graph theory. Thereafter, we proposed a fast self-supervised clustering method involved in this crucial semisupervised framework, in which all labels are inferred from a constructed bipartite graph with exactly k connected components. The proposed method remarkably accelerates the general semisupervised learning through the anchor and consists of four significant parts: 1) obtaining the anchor set as interim through BKHK algorithm; 2) constructing the bipartite graph; 3) solving the self-supervised problem to construct a typical probability model with FSSF; and 4) selecting the most representative points regarding anchors from BKHK as an interim and conducting label propagation. The experimental results on toy examples and benchmark data sets have demonstrated that the proposed method outperforms other approaches.

Learning the Precise Feature for Cluster Assignment

Clustering is one of the fundamental tasks in computer vision and pattern recognition. Recently, deep clustering methods (algorithms based on deep learning) have attracted wide attention with their impressive performance. Most of these algorithms combine deep unsupervised representation learning and standard clustering together. However, the separation of representation learning and clustering will lead to suboptimal solutions because the two-stage strategy prevents representation learning from adapting to subsequent tasks (e.g., clustering according to specific cues). To overcome this issue, efforts have been made in the dynamic adaption of representation and cluster assignment, whereas current state-of-the-art methods suffer from heuristically constructed objectives with the representation and cluster assignment alternatively optimized. To further standardize the clustering problem, we audaciously formulate the objective of clustering as finding a precise feature as the cue for cluster assignment. Based on this, we propose a general-purpose deep clustering framework, which radically integrates representation learning and clustering into a single pipeline for the first time. The proposed framework exploits the powerful ability of recently developed generative models for learning intrinsic features, and imposes an entropy minimization on the distribution of the cluster assignment by a dedicated variational algorithm. The experimental results show that the performance of the proposed method is superior, or at least comparable to, the state-of-the-art methods on the handwritten digit recognition, fashion recognition, face recognition, and object recognition benchmark datasets.

Personalizing self-management via behavioral predictive analytics with health education for improved self-efficacy

The objective of this research is to investigate the feasibility of applying behavioral predictive analytics to optimize diabetes self-management. This research also presents a use case on the application of the anaytics technology platform to deliver an online diabetes prevention program developed by the CDC. The goal of personalized self-management is to affect individuals on behavior change toward actionable health activities on glucose self-monitoring, diet management, and exercise. In conjunction with personalizing self-management, the content of the CDC diabetes prevention program was delivered online directly to a mobile device. The proposed behavioral predictive analytics relies on manifold clustering to identify subpopulations by behavior readiness characteristics exhibiting non-linear properties. Utilizing behavior readiness data of 148 subjects, subpopulations are created using manifold clustering to target personalized actionable health activities. This paper reports the preliminary result of personalizing self-management for 22 subjects under different scenarios and the outcome on improving diabetes self-efficacy of 34 subjects.

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Assess behavior readiness via a proven psychology model: theory of planned behavior

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Segment patients into groups by behavior readiness via advanced manifold clustering

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Enable a closed loop via mobile app to support prediction for dynamic personalization

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Deliver asynchronous health education with demonstrated self-efficacy improvement

Type 2 and pre-diabetes is a chronic disease that affects over 115 million Americans and over 440 million people worldwide. Active patient self-management improves health outcome and lowers healthcare cost. Yet, less than 25% of patients are engaged in active self-health management. Behavioral predictive analytics was developed to improve patient engagement. It applies an advanced clustering technique in machine learning to segment patients into subpopulations by behavior readiness. It dynamically personalizes actionable health activities such as self-monitoring of glucose as well as health education based on one’s behavior readiness. This paper reports (1) the practical feasibility of an engagement channel through an individual’s mobile device to deliver health education for improving diabetes self-efficacy and (2) the validated outcomes of the behavioral predictive analytics to improve engagement in self-health management.