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The scattering transform is a multilayered, wavelet-based transform initially introduced as a mathematical model of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) that has played a foundational role in our understanding of these networks’ stability and invariance properties. In subsequent years, there has been widespread interest in extending the success of CNNs to data sets with non- Euclidean structure, such as graphs and manifolds, leading to the emerging field of geometric deep learning. In order to improve our understanding of the architectures used in this new field, several papers have proposed generalizations of the scattering transform for non-Euclidean data structures such as undirected graphs and compact Riemannian manifolds without boundary. Analogous to the original scattering transform, these works prove that these variants of the scattering transform have desirable stability and invariance properties and aim to improve our understanding of the neural networks used in geometric deep learning. In this paper, we introduce a general, unified model for geometric scattering on measure spaces. Our proposed framework includes previous work on compact Riemannian manifolds without boundary and undirected graphs as special cases but also applies to more general settings such as directed graphs, signed graphs, and manifolds with boundary. We propose a new criterion that identifies to which groups a useful representation should be invariant and show that this criterion is sufficient to guarantee that the scattering transform has desirable stability and invariance properties. Additionally, we consider finite measure spaces that are obtained from randomly sampling an unknown manifold. We propose two methods for constructing a data-driven graph on which the associated graph scattering transform approximates the scattering transform on the underlying manifold. Moreover, we use a diffusion-maps based approach to prove quantitative estimates on the rate of convergence of one of these approximations as the number of sample points tends to infinity. Lastly, we showcase the utility of our method on spherical images, a directed graph stochastic block model, and on high-dimensional single-cell data. 

In this paper, we generalize finite depth wavelet scattering transforms, which we formulate as L^q(R^n) norms of a cascade of continuous wavelet transforms (or dyadic wavelet transforms) and contractive nonlinearities. We then provide norms for these operators, prove that these operators are well-defined, and are Lipschitz continuous to the action of C^2 diffeomorphisms in specific cases. Lastly, we extend our results to formulate an operator invariant to the action of rotations and an operator that is equivariant to the action of rotations. 

The scattering transform is a multilayered wavelet-based architecture that acts as a model of convolutional neural networks. Recently, several works have generalized the scattering transform to graph-structured data. Our work builds on these constructions by introducing windowed and nonwindowed geometric scattering transforms for graphs based on two very general classes wavelets, which are in most cases based on asymmetric matrices. We show that these transforms have many of the same theoretical guarantees as their symmetric counterparts. As a result, the proposed construction unifies and extends known theoretical results for many of the existing graph scattering architectures. Therefore, it helps bridge the gap between geometric scattering and other graph neural networks by introducing a large family of networks with provable stability and invariance guarantees. These results lay the groundwork for future deep learning architectures for graph-structured data that have learned filters and also provably have desirable theoretical properties. 

This article discusses a generalization of the 1-dimensional multi-reference alignment problem. The goal is to recover a hidden signal from many noisy observations, where each noisy observation includes a random translation and random dilation of the hidden signal, as well as high additive noise. We propose a method that recovers the power spectrum of the hidden signal by applying a data-driven, nonlinear unbiasing procedure, and thus the hidden signal is obtained up to an unknown phase. An unbiased estimator of the power spectrum is defined, whose error depends on the sample size and noise levels, and we precisely quantify the convergence rate of the proposed estimator. The unbiasing procedure relies on knowledge of the dilation distribution, and we implement an optimization procedure to learn the dilation variance when this parameter is unknown. Our theoretical work is supported by extensive numerical experiments on a wide range of signals. 

Abstract MotivationAccurately representing biological networks in a low-dimensional space, also known as network embedding, is a critical step in network-based machine learning and is carried out widely using node2vec, an unsupervised method based on biased random walks. However, while many networks, including functional gene interaction networks, are dense, weighted graphs, node2vec is fundamentally limited in its ability to use edge weights during the biased random walk generation process, thus under-using all the information in the network. ResultsHere, we present node2vec+, a natural extension of node2vec that accounts for edge weights when calculating walk biases and reduces to node2vec in the cases of unweighted graphs or unbiased walks. Using two synthetic datasets, we empirically show that node2vec+ is more robust to additive noise than node2vec in weighted graphs. Then, using genome-scale functional gene networks to solve a wide range of gene function and disease prediction tasks, we demonstrate the superior performance of node2vec+ over node2vec in the case of weighted graphs. Notably, due to the limited amount of training data in the gene classification tasks, graph neural networks such as GCN and GraphSAGE are outperformed by both node2vec and node2vec+. Availability and implementationThe data and code are available on GitHub at https://github.com/krishnanlab/node2vecplus_benchmarks. All additional data underlying this article are available on Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7007164. Supplementary informationSupplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online. 

We present a machine learning model for the analysis of randomly generated discrete signals, modeled as the points of an inhomogeneous, compound Poisson point process. Like the wavelet scattering transform introduced by Mallat, our construction is naturally invariant to translations and reflections, but it decouples the roles of scale and frequency, replacing wavelets with Gabor-type measurements. We show that, with suitable nonlinearities, our measurements distinguish Poisson point processes from common self-similar processes, and separate different types of Poisson point processes. 

Abstract Due to commonalities in pathophysiology, age-related macular degeneration (AMD) represents a uniquely accessible model to investigate therapies for neurodegenerative diseases, leading us to examine whether pathways of disease progression are shared across neurodegenerative conditions. Here we use single-nucleus RNA sequencing to profile lesions from 11 postmortem human retinas with age-related macular degeneration and 6 control retinas with no history of retinal disease. We create a machine-learning pipeline based on recent advances in data geometry and topology and identify activated glial populations enriched in the early phase of disease. Examining single-cell data from Alzheimer’s disease and progressive multiple sclerosis with our pipeline, we find a similar glial activation profile enriched in the early phase of these neurodegenerative diseases. In late-stage age-related macular degeneration, we identify a microglia-to-astrocyte signaling axis mediated by interleukin-1 β which drives angiogenesis characteristic of disease pathogenesis. We validated this mechanism using in vitro and in vivo assays in mouse, identifying a possible new therapeutic target for AMD and possibly other neurodegenerative conditions. Thus, due to shared glial states, the retina provides a potential system for investigating therapeutic approaches in neurodegenerative diseases. 

We propose a nonlinear, wavelet-based signal representation that is translation invariant and robust to both additive noise and random dilations. Motivated by the multi-reference alignment problem and generalizations thereof, we analyze the statistical properties of this representation given a large number of independent corruptions of a target signal. We prove the nonlinear wavelet-based representation uniquely defines the power spectrum but allows for an unbiasing procedure that cannot be directly applied to the power spectrum. After unbiasing the representation to remove the effects of the additive noise and random dilations, we recover an approximation of the power spectrum by solving a convex optimization problem, and thus reduce to a phase retrieval problem. Extensive numerical experiments demonstrate the statistical robustness of this approximation procedure.