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Hau-Tieng Wu

Publications and source records attributed to Hau-Tieng Wu.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

Spatiotemporal Analysis Using Riemannian Composition of Diffusion Operators

Multivariate time-series have become abundant in recent years, as many data-acquisition systems record information through multiple sensors simultaneously. In this paper, we assume the variables pertain to some geometry and present an operator-based approach for spatiotemporal analysis. Our approach combines three components that are often considered separately: (i) manifold learning for building operators representing the geometry of the variables, (ii) Riemannian geometry of symmetric positive-definite matrices for multiscale composition of operators corresponding to different time samples, and (iii) spectral analysis of the composite operators for extracting different dynamic modes. We propose a method that is analogous to the classical wavelet analysis, which we term Riemannian multi-resolution analysis (RMRA). We provide some theoretical results on the spectral analysis of the composite operators, and we demonstrate the proposed method on simulations and on real data.

stat.ML↗

Predicting Trust Using Automated Assessment of Multivariate Interactional Synchrony

Diverse disciplines are interested in how the coordination of interacting agents' movements, emotions, and physiology over time impacts social behavior. Here, we describe a new multivariate procedure for automating the investigation of this kind of behaviorally-relevant "interactional synchrony", and introduce a novel interactional synchrony measure based on features of dynamic time warping (DTW) paths. We demonstrate that our DTW path-based measure of interactional synchrony between facial action units of two people interacting freely in a natural social interaction can be used to predict how much trust they will display in a subsequent Trust Game. We also show that our approach outperforms univariate head movement models, models that consider participants' facial action units independently, and models that use previously proposed synchrony or similarity measures. The insights of this work can be applied to any research question that aims to quantify the temporal coordination of multiple signals over time, but has immediate applications in psychology, medicine, and robotics.

cs.HC↗

When Scattering Transform Meets Non-Gaussian Random Processes, a Double Scaling Limit Result

We explore the finite dimensional distributions of the second-order scattering transform of a class of non-Gaussian processes when all the scaling parameters go to infinity simultaneously. For frequently used wavelets, we find a coupling rule for the scale parameters of the wavelet transform within the first and second layers such that the limit exists. The coupling rule is explicitly expressed in terms of the Hurst index of the long range dependent inputs. More importantly, the spectral density function of the limiting process can be explicitly expressed in terms of the Hurst index of the long-range dependent input process and the Fourier transform of the mother wavelet. To obtain these results, we first show that the scattering transform of a class of non-Gaussian processes can be approximated by the second-order scattering transform of Gaussian processes when the scale parameters are sufficiently large. Secondly, for each approximation process, which is still a non-Gaussian random process, we show that its doubling scaling limit exists by the moment method. The long-range dependent non-Gaussian model considered in this work is realized by real data, and assumptions are supported by numerical results.

math.PR↗

Prenatal stress perturbs fetal iron homeostasis in a sex-specific manner

What is the influence of chronic maternal prenatal stress (PS) on fetal iron homeostasis? In a prospective case-control study in 164 pregnant women, we show that cord blood transferrin saturation is lower in male stressed neonates. The total effect of PS exposure on fetal ferritin revealed a decrease of 15.4% compared with controls. Electrocardiogram-based Fetal Stress Index (FSI) identified affected fetuses non-invasively during the third trimester of gestation. FSI-based timely detection of fetuses affected by PS can support early individualized iron supplementation and neurodevelopmental follow-up to prevent long-term sequelae due to PS-exacerbated impairment of the iron homeostasis.

q-bio.QM↗

Fundamental component enhancement via adaptive nonlinear activation functions

In many real world oscillatory signals, the fundamental component of a signal $f(t)$ might be weak or does not exist. This makes it difficult to estimate the instantaneous frequency of the signal. Traditionally, researchers apply the rectification trick, working with $|f(t)|$ or $\mbox{ReLu}(f(t))$ instead, to enhance the fundamental component. This raises an interesting question: what type of nonlinear function $g:\mathbb{R} \rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ has the property that $g(f(t))$ has a more pronounced fundamental frequency? $g(t) = |t|$ and $g(t) = \mbox{ReLu}(t)$ seem to work well in practice; we propose a variant of $g(t) = 1/(1-|t|)$ and provide a theoretical guarantee. Several simulated signals and real signals are analyzed to demonstrate the performance of the proposed solution.

math.OC↗

How do kernel-based sensor fusion algorithms behave under high dimensional noise?

We study the behavior of two kernel based sensor fusion algorithms, nonparametric canonical correlation analysis (NCCA) and alternating diffusion (AD), under the nonnull setting that the clean datasets collected from two sensors are modeled by a common low dimensional manifold embedded in a high dimensional Euclidean space and the datasets are corrupted by high dimensional noise. We establish the asymptotic limits and convergence rates for the eigenvalues of the associated kernel matrices assuming that the sample dimension and sample size are comparably large, where NCCA and AD are conducted using the Gaussian kernel. It turns out that both the asymptotic limits and convergence rates depend on the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of each sensor and selected bandwidths. On one hand, we show that if NCCA and AD are directly applied to the noisy point clouds without any sanity check, it may generate artificial information that misleads scientists' interpretation. On the other hand, we prove that if the bandwidths are selected adequately, both NCCA and AD can be made robust to high dimensional noise when the SNRs are relatively large.

stat.ML↗

Graph Based Gaussian Processes on Restricted Domains

In nonparametric regression, it is common for the inputs to fall in a restricted subset of Euclidean space. Typical kernel-based methods that do not take into account the intrinsic geometry of the domain across which observations are collected may produce sub-optimal results. In this article, we focus on solving this problem in the context of Gaussian process (GP) models, proposing a new class of Graph Laplacian based GPs (GL-GPs), which learn a covariance that respects the geometry of the input domain. As the heat kernel is intractable computationally, we approximate the covariance using finitely-many eigenpairs of the Graph Laplacian (GL). The GL is constructed from a kernel which depends only on the Euclidean coordinates of the inputs. Hence, we can benefit from the full knowledge about the kernel to extend the covariance structure to newly arriving samples by a Nyström type extension. We provide substantial theoretical support for the GL-GP methodology, and illustrate performance gains in various applications.

stat.ME↗

Optimal Recovery of Precision Matrix for Mahalanobis Distance from High Dimensional Noisy Observations in Manifold Learning

Motivated by establishing theoretical foundations for various manifold learning algorithms, we study the problem of Mahalanobis distance (MD), and the associated precision matrix, estimation from high-dimensional noisy data. By relying on recent transformative results in covariance matrix estimation, we demonstrate the sensitivity of \MD~and the associated precision matrix to measurement noise, determining the exact asymptotic signal-to-noise ratio at which MD fails, and quantifying its performance otherwise. In addition, for an appropriate loss function, we propose an asymptotically optimal shrinker, which is shown to be beneficial over the classical implementation of the MD, both analytically and in simulations. The result is extended to the manifold setup, where the nonlinear interaction between curvature and high-dimensional noise is taken care of. The developed solution is applied to study a multiscale reduction problem in the dynamical system analysis.

math.ST↗

Asymptotic Analysis of Higher-order Scattering Transform of Gaussian Processes

We analyze the scattering transform with the quadratic nonlinearity (STQN) of Gaussian processes without depth limitation. STQN is a nonlinear transform that involves a sequential interlacing convolution and nonlinear operators, which is motivated to model the deep convolutional neural network. We prove that with a proper normalization, the output of STQN converges to a chi-square process with one degree of freedom in the finite dimensional distribution sense, and we provide a total variation distance control of this convergence at each time that converges to zero at an exponential rate. To show these, we derive a recursive formula to represent the intricate nonlinearity of STQN by a linear combination of Wiener chaos, and then apply the Malliavin calculus and Stein's method to achieve the goal.

math.PR↗

Spectral Convergence of Graph Laplacian and Heat Kernel Reconstruction in $L^\infty$ from Random Samples

In the manifold setting, we provide a series of spectral convergence results quantifying how the eigenvectors and eigenvalues of the graph Laplacian converge to the eigenfunctions and eigenvalues of the Laplace-Beltrami operator in the $L^\infty$ sense. The convergence rate is also provided. Based on these results, convergence of the proposed heat kernel approximation algorithm, as well as the convergence rate, to the exact heat kernel is guaranteed. To our knowledge, this is the first work exploring the spectral convergence in the $L^\infty$ sense and providing a numerical heat kernel reconstruction from the point cloud with theoretical guarantees.

math.ST↗

Strong Uniform Consistency with Rates for Kernel Density Estimators with General Kernels on Manifolds

When analyzing modern machine learning algorithms, we may need to handle kernel density estimation (KDE) with intricate kernels that are not designed by the user and might even be irregular and asymmetric. To handle this emerging challenge, we provide a strong uniform consistency result with the $L^\infty$ convergence rate for KDE on Riemannian manifolds with Riemann integrable kernels (in the ambient Euclidean space). We also provide an $L^1$ consistency result for kernel density estimation on Riemannian manifolds with Lebesgue integrable kernels. The isotropic kernels considered in this paper are different from the kernels in the Vapnik-Chervonenkis class that are frequently considered in statistics society. We illustrate the difference when we apply them to estimate the probability density function. Moreover, we elaborate the delicate difference when the kernel is designed on the intrinsic manifold and on the ambient Euclidian space, both might be encountered in practice. At last, we prove the necessary and sufficient condition for an isotropic kernel to be Riemann integrable on a submanifold in the Euclidean space.

math.ST↗

Decomposing non-stationary signals with time-varying wave-shape functions

Modern time series are usually composed of multiple oscillatory components, with time-varying frequency and amplitude contaminated by noise. The signal processing mission is further challenged if each component has an oscillatory pattern, or the wave-shape function, far from a sinusoidal function, and the oscillatory pattern is even changing from time to time. In practice, if multiple components exist, it is desirable to robustly decompose the signal into each component for various purposes, and extract desired dynamics information. Such challenges have raised a significant amount of interest in the past decade, but a satisfactory solution is still lacking. We propose a novel {\em nonlinear regression scheme} to robustly decompose a signal into its constituting multiple oscillatory components with time-varying frequency, amplitude and wave-shape function. We coined the algorithm {\em shape-adaptive mode decomposition (SAMD)}. In addition to simulated signals, we apply SAMD to two physiological signals, impedance pneumography and electroencephalography. Comparison with existing solutions, including linear regression, recursive diffeomorphism-based regression and multiresolution mode decomposition, shows that our proposal can provide an accurate and meaningful decomposition with computational efficiency.

eess.SP↗

Wave-shape oscillatory model for nonstationary periodic time series analysis

The oscillations observed in many time series, particularly in biomedicine, exhibit morphological variations over time. These morphological variations are caused by intrinsic or extrinsic changes to the state of the generating system, henceforth referred to as dynamics. To model these time series (including and specifically pathophysiological ones) and estimate the underlying dynamics, we provide a novel wave-shape oscillatory model. In this model, time-dependent variations in cycle shape occur along a manifold called the wave-shape manifold. To estimate the wave-shape manifold associated with an oscillatory time series, study the dynamics, and visualize the time-dependent changes along the wave-shape manifold, we propose a novel algorithm coined Dynamic Diffusion map (DDmap) by applying the well-established diffusion maps (DM) algorithm to the set of all observed oscillations. We provide a theoretical guarantee on the dynamical information recovered by the DDmap algorithm under the proposed model. Applying the proposed model and algorithm to arterial blood pressure (ABP) signals recorded during general anesthesia leads to the extraction of nociception information. Applying the wave-shape oscillatory model and the DDmap algorithm to cardiac cycles in the electrocardiogram (ECG) leads to ectopy detection and a new ECG-derived respiratory signal, even when the subject has atrial fibrillation.

stat.AP↗

An Efficient Forecasting Approach to Reduce Boundary Effects in Real-Time Time-Frequency Analysis

Time-frequency (TF) representations of time series are intrinsically subject to the boundary effects. As a result, the structures of signals that are highlighted by the representations are garbled when approaching the boundaries of the TF domain. In this paper, for the purpose of real-time TF information acquisition of nonstationary oscillatory time series, we propose a numerically efficient approach for the reduction of such boundary effects. The solution relies on an extension of the analyzed signal obtained by a forecasting technique. In the case of the study of a class of locally oscillating signals, we provide a theoretical guarantee of the performance of our approach. Following a numerical verification of the algorithmic performance of our approach, we validate it by implementing it on biomedical signals.

eess.SP↗

Convergence of Graph Laplacian with kNN Self-tuned Kernels

Kernelized Gram matrix $W$ constructed from data points $\{x_i\}_{i=1}^N$ as $W_{ij}= k_0( \frac{ \| x_i - x_j \|^2} {σ^2} )$ is widely used in graph-based geometric data analysis and unsupervised learning. An important question is how to choose the kernel bandwidth $σ$, and a common practice called self-tuned kernel adaptively sets a $σ_i$ at each point $x_i$ by the $k$-nearest neighbor (kNN) distance. When $x_i$'s are sampled from a $d$-dimensional manifold embedded in a possibly high-dimensional space, unlike with fixed-bandwidth kernels, theoretical results of graph Laplacian convergence with self-tuned kernels have been incomplete. This paper proves the convergence of graph Laplacian operator $L_N$ to manifold (weighted-)Laplacian for a new family of kNN self-tuned kernels $W^{(α)}_{ij} = k_0( \frac{ \| x_i - x_j \|^2}{ ε\hatρ(x_i) \hatρ(x_j)})/\hatρ(x_i)^α\hatρ(x_j)^α$, where $\hatρ$ is the estimated bandwidth function {by kNN}, and the limiting operator is also parametrized by $α$. When $α= 1$, the limiting operator is the weighted manifold Laplacian $Δ_p$. Specifically, we prove the point-wise convergence of $L_N f $ and convergence of the graph Dirichlet form with rates. Our analysis is based on first establishing a $C^0$ consistency for $\hatρ$ which bounds the relative estimation error $|\hatρ - \barρ|/\barρ$ uniformly with high probability, where $\barρ = p^{-1/d}$, and $p$ is the data density function. Our theoretical results reveal the advantage of self-tuned kernel over fixed-bandwidth kernel via smaller variance error in low-density regions. In the algorithm, no prior knowledge of $d$ or data density is needed. The theoretical results are supported by numerical experiments on simulated data and hand-written digit image data.

math.ST↗

Central and Non-central Limit Theorems arising from the Scattering Transform and its Neural Activation Generalization

Motivated by analyzing complicated and non-stationary time series, we study a generalization of the scattering transform (ST) that includes broad neural activation functions, which is called neural activation ST (NAST). On the whole, NAST is a transform that comprises a sequence of ``neural processing units'', each of which applies a high pass filter to the input from the previous layer followed by a composition with a nonlinear function as the output to the next neuron. Here, the nonlinear function models how a neuron gets excited by the input signal. In addition to showing properties like non-expansion, horizontal translational invariability and insensitivity to local deformation, the statistical properties of the second order NAST of a Gaussian process with various dependence and (non-)stationarity structure and its interaction with the chosen high pass filters and activation functions are explored and central limit theorem (CLT) and non-CLT results are provided. Numerical simulations are also provided. The results explain how NAST processes complicated and non-stationary time series, and pave a way towards statistical inference based on NAST under the non-null case.

stat.ML↗

Solving Jigsaw Puzzles By the Graph Connection Laplacian

We propose a novel mathematical framework to address the problem of automatically solving large jigsaw puzzles. This problem assumes a large image, which is cut into equal square pieces that are arbitrarily rotated and shuffled, and asks to recover the original image given the transformed pieces. The main contribution of this work is a method for recovering the rotations of the pieces when both shuffles and rotations are unknown. A major challenge of this procedure is estimating the graph connection Laplacian without the knowledge of shuffles. A careful combination of our proposed method for estimating rotations with any existing method for estimating shuffles results in a practical solution for the jigsaw puzzle problem. Our theory guarantees, in a clean setting, that our basic idea of recovering rotations is robust to some corruption of the connection graph. Numerical experiments demonstrate the competitive accuracy of this solution, its robustness to corruption and, its computational advantage for large puzzles.

cs.CV↗

On the spectral property of kernel-based sensor fusion algorithms of high dimensional data

We apply local laws of random matrices and free probability theory to study the spectral properties of two kernel-based sensor fusion algorithms, nonparametric canonical correlation analysis (NCCA) and alternating diffusion (AD), for two simultaneously recorded high dimensional datasets under the null hypothesis. The matrix of interest is the product of the kernel matrices associated with the databsets, which may not be diagonalizable in general. We prove that in the regime where dimensions of both random vectors are comparable to the sample size, if NCCA and AD are conducted using a smooth kernel function, then the first few nontrivial eigenvalues will converge to real deterministic values provided the datasets are independent Gaussian random vectors. Toward the claimed result, we also provide a convergence rate of eigenvalues of a kernel affinity matrix.

math.ST↗