Deep Divergence-Based Approach to Clustering

A promising direction in deep learning research consists in learning representations and simultaneously discovering cluster structure in unlabeled data by optimizing a discriminative loss function. As opposed to supervised deep learning, this line of research is in its infancy, and how to design and optimize suitable loss functions to train deep neural networks for clustering is still an open question. Our contribution to this emerging field is a new deep clustering network that leverages the discriminative power of information-theoretic divergence measures, which have been shown to be effective in traditional clustering. We propose a novel loss function that incorporates geometric regularization constraints, thus avoiding degenerate structures of the resulting clustering partition. Experiments on synthetic benchmarks and real datasets show that the proposed network achieves competitive performance with respect to other state-of-the-art methods, scales well to large datasets, and does not require pre-training steps

Information-Theoretic Inference of Large Transcriptional Regulatory Networks

The paper presents MRNET, an original method for inferring genetic networks from microarray data. The method is based on maximum relevance/minimum redundancy (MRMR), an effective information-theoretic technique for feature selection in supervised learning. The MRMR principle consists in selecting among the least redundant variables the ones that have the highest mutual information with the target. MRNET extends this feature selection principle to networks in order to infer gene-dependence relationships from microarray data. The paper assesses MRNET by benchmarking it against RELNET, CLR, and ARACNE, three state-of-the-art information-theoretic methods for large (up to several thousands of genes) network inference. Experimental results on thirty synthetically generated microarray datasets show that MRNET is competitive with these methods.SCOPUS: ar.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe