6,315 research outputs found
Mapping Topographic Structure in White Matter Pathways with Level Set Trees
Fiber tractography on diffusion imaging data offers rich potential for
describing white matter pathways in the human brain, but characterizing the
spatial organization in these large and complex data sets remains a challenge.
We show that level set trees---which provide a concise representation of the
hierarchical mode structure of probability density functions---offer a
statistically-principled framework for visualizing and analyzing topography in
fiber streamlines. Using diffusion spectrum imaging data collected on
neurologically healthy controls (N=30), we mapped white matter pathways from
the cortex into the striatum using a deterministic tractography algorithm that
estimates fiber bundles as dimensionless streamlines. Level set trees were used
for interactive exploration of patterns in the endpoint distributions of the
mapped fiber tracks and an efficient segmentation of the tracks that has
empirical accuracy comparable to standard nonparametric clustering methods. We
show that level set trees can also be generalized to model pseudo-density
functions in order to analyze a broader array of data types, including entire
fiber streamlines. Finally, resampling methods show the reliability of the
level set tree as a descriptive measure of topographic structure, illustrating
its potential as a statistical descriptor in brain imaging analysis. These
results highlight the broad applicability of level set trees for visualizing
and analyzing high-dimensional data like fiber tractography output
Nested Hierarchical Dirichlet Processes
We develop a nested hierarchical Dirichlet process (nHDP) for hierarchical
topic modeling. The nHDP is a generalization of the nested Chinese restaurant
process (nCRP) that allows each word to follow its own path to a topic node
according to a document-specific distribution on a shared tree. This alleviates
the rigid, single-path formulation of the nCRP, allowing a document to more
easily express thematic borrowings as a random effect. We derive a stochastic
variational inference algorithm for the model, in addition to a greedy subtree
selection method for each document, which allows for efficient inference using
massive collections of text documents. We demonstrate our algorithm on 1.8
million documents from The New York Times and 3.3 million documents from
Wikipedia.Comment: To appear in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine
Intelligence, Special Issue on Bayesian Nonparametric
Non-parametric Bayesian modeling of complex networks
Modeling structure in complex networks using Bayesian non-parametrics makes
it possible to specify flexible model structures and infer the adequate model
complexity from the observed data. This paper provides a gentle introduction to
non-parametric Bayesian modeling of complex networks: Using an infinite mixture
model as running example we go through the steps of deriving the model as an
infinite limit of a finite parametric model, inferring the model parameters by
Markov chain Monte Carlo, and checking the model's fit and predictive
performance. We explain how advanced non-parametric models for complex networks
can be derived and point out relevant literature
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