1,838 research outputs found
Testing for Differences in Gaussian Graphical Models: Applications to Brain Connectivity
Functional brain networks are well described and estimated from data with
Gaussian Graphical Models (GGMs), e.g. using sparse inverse covariance
estimators. Comparing functional connectivity of subjects in two populations
calls for comparing these estimated GGMs. Our goal is to identify differences
in GGMs known to have similar structure. We characterize the uncertainty of
differences with confidence intervals obtained using a parametric distribution
on parameters of a sparse estimator. Sparse penalties enable statistical
guarantees and interpretable models even in high-dimensional and low-sample
settings. Characterizing the distributions of sparse models is inherently
challenging as the penalties produce a biased estimator. Recent work invokes
the sparsity assumptions to effectively remove the bias from a sparse estimator
such as the lasso. These distributions can be used to give confidence intervals
on edges in GGMs, and by extension their differences. However, in the case of
comparing GGMs, these estimators do not make use of any assumed joint structure
among the GGMs. Inspired by priors from brain functional connectivity we derive
the distribution of parameter differences under a joint penalty when parameters
are known to be sparse in the difference. This leads us to introduce the
debiased multi-task fused lasso, whose distribution can be characterized in an
efficient manner. We then show how the debiased lasso and multi-task fused
lasso can be used to obtain confidence intervals on edge differences in GGMs.
We validate the techniques proposed on a set of synthetic examples as well as
neuro-imaging dataset created for the study of autism
Exact Hybrid Covariance Thresholding for Joint Graphical Lasso
This paper considers the problem of estimating multiple related Gaussian
graphical models from a -dimensional dataset consisting of different
classes. Our work is based upon the formulation of this problem as group
graphical lasso. This paper proposes a novel hybrid covariance thresholding
algorithm that can effectively identify zero entries in the precision matrices
and split a large joint graphical lasso problem into small subproblems. Our
hybrid covariance thresholding method is superior to existing uniform
thresholding methods in that our method can split the precision matrix of each
individual class using different partition schemes and thus split group
graphical lasso into much smaller subproblems, each of which can be solved very
fast. In addition, this paper establishes necessary and sufficient conditions
for our hybrid covariance thresholding algorithm. The superior performance of
our thresholding method is thoroughly analyzed and illustrated by a few
experiments on simulated data and real gene expression data
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