Search arXivSearch

arXiv · 1503.01291

Sparse multi-view matrix factorisation: a multivariate approach to multiple tissue comparisons

Abstract

Gene expression levels in a population vary extensively across tissues. Such heterogeneity is caused by genetic variability and environmental factors, and is expected to be linked to disease development. The abundance of experimental data now enables the identification of features of gene expression profiles that are shared across tissues, and those that are tissue-specific. While most current research is concerned with characterising differential expression by comparing mean expression profiles across tissues, it is also believed that a significant difference in a gene expression's variance across tissues may also be associated to molecular mechanisms that are important for tissue development and function. We propose a sparse multi-view matrix factorisation (sMVMF) algorithm to jointly analyse gene expression measurements in multiple tissues, where each tissue provides a different "view" of the underlying organism. The proposed methodology can be interpreted as an extension of principal component analysis in that it provides the means to decompose the total sample variance in each tissue into the sum of two components: one capturing the variance that is shared across tissues, and one isolating the tissue-specific variances. sMVMF has been used to jointly model mRNA expression profiles in three tissues - adipose, skin and LCL - which are available for a large and well-phenotyped twins cohort, TwinsUK. Using sMVMF, we are able to prioritise genes based on whether their variation patterns are specific to each tissue. Furthermore, using DNA methylation profiles available, we provide supporting evidence that adipose-specific gene expression patterns may be driven by epigenetic effects.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Zi Wang, Wei Yuan, Giovanni Montana. 2015-06-25. Sparse multi-view matrix factorisation: a multivariate approach to multiple tissue comparisons. https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics%2Fbtv344

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

Robust Mixture Models for Algorithmic Fairness Under Latent Heterogeneity

Machine learning models optimized for average performance can perform poorly on vulnerable subpopulations. Existing approaches often rely on groups specified in advance, yet fairness-relevant subgroup structure may be latent, intersectional, and driven by complex interactions among continuous and discrete attributes. We introduce \textbf{ROME} (\textbf{\underline{RO}}bust \textbf{\underline{M}}ixture \textbf{\underline{E}}nsemble), a framework that learns latent group structure while optimizing worst-group predictive performance. ROME connects latent-variable modeling with distributionally robust optimization (DRO) through two complementary approaches: an Expectation-Maximization formulation with robust aggregation for linear models and a neural Mixture-of-Experts formulation for nonlinear settings. Across simulations and three real-world regression datasets, ROME improves worst-group performance while maintaining competitive overall accuracy, including in comparisons with established group-aware and group-label-free robust learning methods. ROME provides a flexible approach to robust prediction when fairness-relevant attributes are available for subgroup discovery but their direct use in group-specific outcome models is restricted.

stat.ML

Boltzmann generators for amorphous particle systems

Sampling configurations in thermodynamic equilibrium is a long-standing challenge in statistical physics. Boltzmann generators address this problem by employing generative models to propose independent configurations, which are then reweighted via importance sampling using exact likelihood evaluations. Recent Boltzmann Generators based on continuous normalizing flows and flow matching have achieved significant success for particle systems and biomolecules. However, these approaches have not been extended to amorphous materials (glasses), for which equilibrium sampling is notoriously slow. Because of their disordered structure, the invariances and geometrical constraints of amorphous materials differ from those of crystals and biomolecules, preventing the direct use of existing generative models. Here, we develop Boltzmann Generators tailored to amorphous materials by building the required equivariances directly into Riemannian stochastic interpolants. Our framework incorporates periodic boundary conditions and particle symmetries using equivariant graph neural networks. Numerical experiments demonstrate that enforcing physical symmetries significantly improves the accuracy of Boltzmann Generators, but also reveal an intrinsic limitation of the continuous-flow formulation: accumulated numerical errors during likelihood integration break time-reversibility, compromising exact thermodynamic reweighting. These results reveal a fundamental challenge for continuous-flow generative models in statistical mechanics and call for alternative approaches that preserve exact thermodynamic consistency.

stat.ML

Diagonalized Attention for Individualized Regression: Latent-Row Localization and Prediction

Modern text and image representations are often matrix-valued, with rows corresponding to tokens, patches, or other local feature vectors. Predictive information is often sparse but sample-specific, making classical sparse regression methods with a common support poorly suited to this heterogeneity. This paper formalizes an individualized sparse regression framework for matrix-valued covariates in which each observation has its own rows of interest, while the associated regression effects are shared across the population. To estimate this model, we introduce a diagonalized attention mechanism that uses query--key scores to localize sample-specific signal rows and a value matrix for downstream regression. The proposed method has a parameter dimension independent of sample size and can identify rows of interest for new observations without their responses. We establish existence theorems showing that, under suitable score-separation and concentration conditions, single-head and multi-head diagonalized attention models recover the latent rows with high probability, yielding prediction risk bounds. Our theory therefore provides a statistical explanation of how attention-based scoring localizes sample-specific signals in heterogeneous matrix-valued data. Simulations demonstrate strong prediction and localization in regression and misspecified classification across varying sample sizes, dimensions, and signal cardinalities. Real sentiment analyses show improved classification accuracy and interpretable token selection.

stat.ML