Pattern Formation with a Compartmental Lateral Inhibition System

We propose a compartmental lateral inhibition system that generates contrasting patterns of gene expression between neighboring compartments. The system consists of a set of compartments interconnected by channels. Each compartment contains a colony of cells that produce diffusible molecules to be detected by the neighboring colony, and each cell is equipped with an inhibitory circuit that reduces its production when the detected signal is stronger. We develop a technique to analyze the steady-state patterns emerging from this lateral inhibition system and apply it to a specific implementation. The analysis shows that the proposed system indeed exhibits contrasting patterns within realistic parameter ranges.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figure

Graph learning under spectral sparsity constraints

Graph inference plays an essential role in machine learning, pattern recognition, and classification. Signal processing based approaches in literature generally assume some variational property of the observed data on the graph. We make a case for inferring graphs on which the observed data has high variation. We propose a signal processing based inference model that allows for wideband frequency variation in the data and propose an algorithm for graph inference. The proposed inference algorithm consists of two steps: 1) learning orthogonal eigenvectors of a graph from the data; 2) recovering the adjacency matrix of the graph topology from the given graph eigenvectors. The first step is solved by an iterative algorithm with a closed-form solution. In the second step, the adjacency matrix is inferred from the eigenvectors by solving a convex optimization problem. Numerical results on synthetic data show the proposed inference algorithm can effectively capture the meaningful graph topology from observed data under the wideband assumption