Supervised learning of short and high-dimensional temporal sequences for life science measurements

The analysis of physiological processes over time are often given by spectrometric or gene expression profiles over time with only few time points but a large number of measured variables. The analysis of such temporal sequences is challenging and only few methods have been proposed. The information can be encoded time independent, by means of classical expression differences for a single time point or in expression profiles over time. Available methods are limited to unsupervised and semi-supervised settings. The predictive variables can be identified only by means of wrapper or post-processing techniques. This is complicated due to the small number of samples for such studies. Here, we present a supervised learning approach, termed Supervised Topographic Mapping Through Time (SGTM-TT). It learns a supervised mapping of the temporal sequences onto a low dimensional grid. We utilize a hidden markov model (HMM) to account for the time domain and relevance learning to identify the relevant feature dimensions most predictive over time. The learned mapping can be used to visualize the temporal sequences and to predict the class of a new sequence. The relevance learning permits the identification of discriminating masses or gen expressions and prunes dimensions which are unnecessary for the classification task or encode mainly noise. In this way we obtain a very efficient learning system for temporal sequences. The results indicate that using simultaneous supervised learning and metric adaptation significantly improves the prediction accuracy for synthetically and real life data in comparison to the standard techniques. The discriminating features, identified by relevance learning, compare favorably with the results of alternative methods. Our method permits the visualization of the data on a low dimensional grid, highlighting the observed temporal structure

Mathematical Foundations of the Self Organized Neighbor Embedding ({SONE}) for Dimension Reduction and Visualization

Abstract. In this paper we propose the generalization of the recently introduced Neighbor Embedding Exploratory Observation Machine (NE-XOM) for dimension reduction and visualization. We provide a general mathematical framework called Self Organized Neighbor Embedding (SONE).Ittreatsthecomponents, likedatasimilarity measures andneighborhood functions, independently and easily changeable. And it enables the utilization of different divergences, based on the theory of Fréchet derivatives. In this way we propose a new dimension reduction and visualization algorithm, which can be easily adapted to the user specific request and the actual problem.