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Recently, Raman Spectroscopy (RS) was demonstrated to be a non-destructive way of cancer diagnosis, due to the uniqueness of RS measurements in revealing molecular biochemical changes between cancerous vs. normal tissues and cells. In order to design computational approaches for cancer detection, the quality and quantity of tissue samples for RS are important for accurate prediction. In reality, however, obtaining skin cancer samples is difficult and expensive due to privacy and other constraints. With a small number of samples, the training of the classifier is difficult, and often results in overfitting. Therefore, it is important to have more samples to better train classifiers for accurate cancer tissue classification. To overcome these limitations, this paper presents a novel generative adversarial network based skin cancer tissue classification framework. Specifically, we design a data augmentation module that employs a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to generate synthetic RS data resembling the training data classes. The original tissue samples and the generated data are concatenated to train classification modules. Experiments on real-world RS data demonstrate that (1) data augmentation can help improve skin cancer tissue classification accuracy, and (2) generative adversarial network can be used to generate reliable synthetic Raman spectroscopic data.

 

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are important tools for transductive learning tasks, such as node classification in graphs, due to their expressive power in capturing complex interdependency between nodes. To enable GNN learning, existing works typically assume that labeled nodes, from two or multiple classes, are provided, so that a discriminative classifier can be learned from the labeled data. In reality, this assumption might be too restrictive for applications, as users may only provide labels of interest in a single class for a small number of nodes. In addition, most GNN models only aggregate information from short distances ( e.g. , 1-hop neighbors) in each round, and fail to capture long-distance relationship in graphs. In this article, we propose a novel GNN framework, long-short distance aggregation networks, to overcome these limitations. By generating multiple graphs at different distance levels, based on the adjacency matrix, we develop a long-short distance attention model to model these graphs. The direct neighbors are captured via a short-distance attention mechanism, and neighbors with long distance are captured by a long-distance attention mechanism. Two novel risk estimators are further employed to aggregate long-short-distance networks, for PU learning and the loss is back-propagated for model learning. Experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm. 

In traditional graph learning tasks, such as node classification, learning is carried out in a closed-world setting where the number of classes and their training samples are provided to help train models, and the learning goal is to correctly classify unlabeled nodes into classes already known. In reality, due to limited labeling capability and dynamic evolving of networks, some nodes in the networks may not belong to any existing/seen classes, and therefore cannot be correctly classified by closed-world learning algorithms. In this paper, we propose a new open-world graph learning paradigm, where the learning goal is to not only classify nodes belonging to seen classes into correct groups, but also classify nodes not belonging to existing classes to an unseen class. The essential challenge of the openworld graph learning is that (1) unseen class has no labeled samples, and may exist in an arbitrary form different from existing seen classes; and (2) both graph feature learning and prediction should differentiate whether a node may belong to an existing/seen class or an unseen class. To tackle the challenges, we propose an uncertain node representation learning approach, using constrained variational graph autoencoder networks, where the label loss and class uncertainty loss constraints are used to ensure that the node representation learning are sensitive to unseen class. As a result, node embedding features are denoted by distributions, instead of deterministic feature vectors. By using a sampling process to generate multiple versions of feature vectors, we are able to test the certainty of a node belonging to seen classes, and automatically determine a threshold to reject nodes not belonging to seen classes as unseen class nodes. Experiments on real-world networks demonstrate the algorithm performance, comparing to baselines. Case studies and ablation analysis also show the rationale of our design for open-world graph learning.