Bayesian Dynamic DAG Learning: Application in Discovering Dynamic Effective Connectome of Brain

Understanding the complex mechanisms of the brain can be unraveled by extracting the Dynamic Effective Connectome (DEC). Recently, score-based Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) discovery methods have shown significant improvements in extracting the causal structure and inferring effective connectivity. However, learning DEC through these methods still faces two main challenges: one with the fundamental impotence of high-dimensional dynamic DAG discovery methods and the other with the low quality of fMRI data. In this paper, we introduce Bayesian Dynamic DAG learning with M-matrices Acyclicity characterization \textbf{(BDyMA)} method to address the challenges in discovering DEC. The presented dynamic causal model enables us to discover bidirected edges as well. Leveraging an unconstrained framework in the BDyMA method leads to more accurate results in detecting high-dimensional networks, achieving sparser outcomes, making it particularly suitable for extracting DEC. Additionally, the score function of the BDyMA method allows the incorporation of prior knowledge into the process of dynamic causal discovery which further enhances the accuracy of results. Comprehensive simulations on synthetic data and experiments on Human Connectome Project (HCP) data demonstrate that our method can handle both of the two main challenges, yielding more accurate and reliable DEC compared to state-of-the-art and baseline methods. Additionally, we investigate the trustworthiness of DTI data as prior knowledge for DEC discovery and show the improvements in DEC discovery when the DTI data is incorporated into the process.

Stochastic First-Order Learning for Large-Scale Flexibly Tied Gaussian Mixture Model

Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM) are one of the most potent parametric density estimators based on the kernel model that finds application in many scientific domains. In recent years, with the dramatic enlargement of data sources, typical machine learning algorithms, e.g. Expectation Maximization (EM), encounters difficulty with high-dimensional and streaming data. Moreover, complicated densities often demand a large number of Gaussian components. This paper proposes a fast online parameter estimation algorithm for GMM by using first-order stochastic optimization. This approach provides a framework to cope with the challenges of GMM when faced with high-dimensional streaming data and complex densities by leveraging the flexibly-tied factorization of the covariance matrix. A new stochastic Manifold optimization algorithm that preserves the orthogonality is introduced and used along with the well-known Euclidean space numerical optimization. Numerous empirical results on both synthetic and real datasets justify the effectiveness of our proposed stochastic method over EM-based methods in the sense of better-converged maximum for likelihood function, fewer number of needed epochs for convergence, and less time consumption per epoch.