Matching Items (7)
Filtering by

Clear all filters

151689-Thumbnail Image.png
Description
Sparsity has become an important modeling tool in areas such as genetics, signal and audio processing, medical image processing, etc. Via the penalization of l-1 norm based regularization, the structured sparse learning algorithms can produce highly accurate models while imposing various predefined structures on the data, such as feature groups

Sparsity has become an important modeling tool in areas such as genetics, signal and audio processing, medical image processing, etc. Via the penalization of l-1 norm based regularization, the structured sparse learning algorithms can produce highly accurate models while imposing various predefined structures on the data, such as feature groups or graphs. In this thesis, I first propose to solve a sparse learning model with a general group structure, where the predefined groups may overlap with each other. Then, I present three real world applications which can benefit from the group structured sparse learning technique. In the first application, I study the Alzheimer's Disease diagnosis problem using multi-modality neuroimaging data. In this dataset, not every subject has all data sources available, exhibiting an unique and challenging block-wise missing pattern. In the second application, I study the automatic annotation and retrieval of fruit-fly gene expression pattern images. Combined with the spatial information, sparse learning techniques can be used to construct effective representation of the expression images. In the third application, I present a new computational approach to annotate developmental stage for Drosophila embryos in the gene expression images. In addition, it provides a stage score that enables one to more finely annotate each embryo so that they are divided into early and late periods of development within standard stage demarcations. Stage scores help us to illuminate global gene activities and changes much better, and more refined stage annotations improve our ability to better interpret results when expression pattern matches are discovered between genes.
ContributorsYuan, Lei (Author) / Ye, Jieping (Thesis advisor) / Wang, Yalin (Committee member) / Xue, Guoliang (Committee member) / Kumar, Sudhir (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
151402-Thumbnail Image.png
Description
Drosophila melanogaster, as an important model organism, is used to explore the mechanism which governs cell differentiation and embryonic development. Understanding the mechanism will help to reveal the effects of genes on other species or even human beings. Currently, digital camera techniques make high quality Drosophila gene expression imaging possible.

Drosophila melanogaster, as an important model organism, is used to explore the mechanism which governs cell differentiation and embryonic development. Understanding the mechanism will help to reveal the effects of genes on other species or even human beings. Currently, digital camera techniques make high quality Drosophila gene expression imaging possible. On the other hand, due to the advances in biology, gene expression images which can reveal spatiotemporal patterns are generated in a high-throughput pace. Thus, an automated and efficient system that can analyze gene expression will become a necessary tool for investigating the gene functions, interactions and developmental processes. One investigation method is to compare the expression patterns of different developmental stages. Recently, however, the expression patterns are manually annotated with rough stage ranges. The work of annotation requires professional knowledge from experienced biologists. Hence, how to transfer the domain knowledge in biology into an automated system which can automatically annotate the patterns provides a challenging problem for computer scientists. In this thesis, the problem of stage annotation for Drosophila embryo is modeled in the machine learning framework. Three sparse learning algorithms and one ensemble algorithm are used to attack the problem. The sparse algorithms are Lasso, group Lasso and sparse group Lasso. The ensemble algorithm is based on a voting method. Besides that the proposed algorithms can annotate the patterns to stages instead of stage ranges with high accuracy; the decimal stage annotation algorithm presents a novel way to annotate the patterns to decimal stages. In addition, some analysis on the algorithm performance are made and corresponding explanations are given. Finally, with the proposed system, all the lateral view BDGP and FlyFish images are annotated and several interesting applications of decimal stage value are revealed.
ContributorsPan, Cheng (Author) / Ye, Jieping (Thesis advisor) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Farin, Gerald (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
151587-Thumbnail Image.png
Description
The rapid growth in the high-throughput technologies last few decades makes the manual processing of the generated data to be impracticable. Even worse, the machine learning and data mining techniques seemed to be paralyzed against these massive datasets. High-dimensionality is one of the most common challenges for machine learning and

The rapid growth in the high-throughput technologies last few decades makes the manual processing of the generated data to be impracticable. Even worse, the machine learning and data mining techniques seemed to be paralyzed against these massive datasets. High-dimensionality is one of the most common challenges for machine learning and data mining tasks. Feature selection aims to reduce dimensionality by selecting a small subset of the features that perform at least as good as the full feature set. Generally, the learning performance, e.g. classification accuracy, and algorithm complexity are used to measure the quality of the algorithm. Recently, the stability of feature selection algorithms has gained an increasing attention as a new indicator due to the necessity to select similar subsets of features each time when the algorithm is run on the same dataset even in the presence of a small amount of perturbation. In order to cure the selection stability issue, we should understand the cause of instability first. In this dissertation, we will investigate the causes of instability in high-dimensional datasets using well-known feature selection algorithms. As a result, we found that the stability mostly data-dependent. According to these findings, we propose a framework to improve selection stability by solving these main causes. In particular, we found that data noise greatly impacts the stability and the learning performance as well. So, we proposed to reduce it in order to improve both selection stability and learning performance. However, current noise reduction approaches are not able to distinguish between data noise and variation in samples from different classes. For this reason, we overcome this limitation by using Supervised noise reduction via Low Rank Matrix Approximation, SLRMA for short. The proposed framework has proved to be successful on different types of datasets with high-dimensionality, such as microarrays and images datasets. However, this framework cannot handle unlabeled, hence, we propose Local SVD to overcome this limitation.
ContributorsAlelyani, Salem (Author) / Liu, Huan (Thesis advisor) / Xue, Guoliang (Committee member) / Ye, Jieping (Committee member) / Zhao, Zheng (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
151154-Thumbnail Image.png
Description
Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is the most common form of dementia observed in elderly patients and has significant social-economic impact. There are many initiatives which aim to capture leading causes of AD. Several genetic, imaging, and biochemical markers are being explored to monitor progression of AD and explore treatment and detection

Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is the most common form of dementia observed in elderly patients and has significant social-economic impact. There are many initiatives which aim to capture leading causes of AD. Several genetic, imaging, and biochemical markers are being explored to monitor progression of AD and explore treatment and detection options. The primary focus of this thesis is to identify key biomarkers to understand the pathogenesis and prognosis of Alzheimer's Disease. Feature selection is the process of finding a subset of relevant features to develop efficient and robust learning models. It is an active research topic in diverse areas such as computer vision, bioinformatics, information retrieval, chemical informatics, and computational finance. In this work, state of the art feature selection algorithms, such as Student's t-test, Relief-F, Information Gain, Gini Index, Chi-Square, Fisher Kernel Score, Kruskal-Wallis, Minimum Redundancy Maximum Relevance, and Sparse Logistic regression with Stability Selection have been extensively exploited to identify informative features for AD using data from Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI). An integrative approach which uses blood plasma protein, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, and psychometric assessment scores biomarkers has been explored. This work also analyzes the techniques to handle unbalanced data and evaluate the efficacy of sampling techniques. Performance of feature selection algorithm is evaluated using the relevance of derived features and the predictive power of the algorithm using Random Forest and Support Vector Machine classifiers. Performance metrics such as Accuracy, Sensitivity and Specificity, and area under the Receiver Operating Characteristic curve (AUC) have been used for evaluation. The feature selection algorithms best suited to analyze AD proteomics data have been proposed. The key biomarkers distinguishing healthy and AD patients, Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) converters and non-converters, and healthy and MCI patients have been identified.
ContributorsDubey, Rashmi (Author) / Ye, Jieping (Thesis advisor) / Wang, Yalin (Committee member) / Wu, Tong (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
154269-Thumbnail Image.png
Description
Understanding the complexity of temporal and spatial characteristics of gene expression over brain development is one of the crucial research topics in neuroscience. An accurate description of the locations and expression status of relative genes requires extensive experiment resources. The Allen Developing Mouse Brain Atlas provides a large number of

Understanding the complexity of temporal and spatial characteristics of gene expression over brain development is one of the crucial research topics in neuroscience. An accurate description of the locations and expression status of relative genes requires extensive experiment resources. The Allen Developing Mouse Brain Atlas provides a large number of in situ hybridization (ISH) images of gene expression over seven different mouse brain developmental stages. Studying mouse brain models helps us understand the gene expressions in human brains. This atlas collects about thousands of genes and now they are manually annotated by biologists. Due to the high labor cost of manual annotation, investigating an efficient approach to perform automated gene expression annotation on mouse brain images becomes necessary. In this thesis, a novel efficient approach based on machine learning framework is proposed. Features are extracted from raw brain images, and both binary classification and multi-class classification models are built with some supervised learning methods. To generate features, one of the most adopted methods in current research effort is to apply the bag-of-words (BoW) algorithm. However, both the efficiency and the accuracy of BoW are not outstanding when dealing with large-scale data. Thus, an augmented sparse coding method, which is called Stochastic Coordinate Coding, is adopted to generate high-level features in this thesis. In addition, a new multi-label classification model is proposed in this thesis. Label hierarchy is built based on the given brain ontology structure. Experiments have been conducted on the atlas and the results show that this approach is efficient and classifies the images with a relatively higher accuracy.
ContributorsZhao, Xinlin (Author) / Ye, Jieping (Thesis advisor) / Wang, Yalin (Thesis advisor) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
153085-Thumbnail Image.png
Description
Advances in data collection technologies have made it cost-effective to obtain heterogeneous data from multiple data sources. Very often, the data are of very high dimension and feature selection is preferred in order to reduce noise, save computational cost and learn interpretable models. Due to the multi-modality nature of heterogeneous

Advances in data collection technologies have made it cost-effective to obtain heterogeneous data from multiple data sources. Very often, the data are of very high dimension and feature selection is preferred in order to reduce noise, save computational cost and learn interpretable models. Due to the multi-modality nature of heterogeneous data, it is interesting to design efficient machine learning models that are capable of performing variable selection and feature group (data source) selection simultaneously (a.k.a bi-level selection). In this thesis, I carry out research along this direction with a particular focus on designing efficient optimization algorithms. I start with a unified bi-level learning model that contains several existing feature selection models as special cases. Then the proposed model is further extended to tackle the block-wise missing data, one of the major challenges in the diagnosis of Alzheimer's Disease (AD). Moreover, I propose a novel interpretable sparse group feature selection model that greatly facilitates the procedure of parameter tuning and model selection. Last but not least, I show that by solving the sparse group hard thresholding problem directly, the sparse group feature selection model can be further improved in terms of both algorithmic complexity and efficiency. Promising results are demonstrated in the extensive evaluation on multiple real-world data sets.
ContributorsXiang, Shuo (Author) / Ye, Jieping (Thesis advisor) / Mittelmann, Hans D (Committee member) / Davulcu, Hasan (Committee member) / He, Jingrui (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
155228-Thumbnail Image.png
Description
Imaging genetics is an emerging and promising technique that investigates how genetic variations affect brain development, structure, and function. By exploiting disorder-related neuroimaging phenotypes, this class of studies provides a novel direction to reveal and understand the complex genetic mechanisms. Oftentimes, imaging genetics studies are challenging due to the relatively

Imaging genetics is an emerging and promising technique that investigates how genetic variations affect brain development, structure, and function. By exploiting disorder-related neuroimaging phenotypes, this class of studies provides a novel direction to reveal and understand the complex genetic mechanisms. Oftentimes, imaging genetics studies are challenging due to the relatively small number of subjects but extremely high-dimensionality of both imaging data and genomic data. In this dissertation, I carry on my research on imaging genetics with particular focuses on two tasks---building predictive models between neuroimaging data and genomic data, and identifying disorder-related genetic risk factors through image-based biomarkers. To this end, I consider a suite of structured sparse methods---that can produce interpretable models and are robust to overfitting---for imaging genetics. With carefully-designed sparse-inducing regularizers, different biological priors are incorporated into learning models. More specifically, in the Allen brain image--gene expression study, I adopt an advanced sparse coding approach for image feature extraction and employ a multi-task learning approach for multi-class annotation. Moreover, I propose a label structured-based two-stage learning framework, which utilizes the hierarchical structure among labels, for multi-label annotation. In the Alzheimer's disease neuroimaging initiative (ADNI) imaging genetics study, I employ Lasso together with EDPP (enhanced dual polytope projections) screening rules to fast identify Alzheimer's disease risk SNPs. I also adopt the tree-structured group Lasso with MLFre (multi-layer feature reduction) screening rules to incorporate linkage disequilibrium information into modeling. Moreover, I propose a novel absolute fused Lasso model for ADNI imaging genetics. This method utilizes SNP spatial structure and is robust to the choice of reference alleles of genotype coding. In addition, I propose a two-level structured sparse model that incorporates gene-level networks through a graph penalty into SNP-level model construction. Lastly, I explore a convolutional neural network approach for accurate predicting Alzheimer's disease related imaging phenotypes. Experimental results on real-world imaging genetics applications demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed structured sparse methods.
ContributorsYang, Tao (Author) / Ye, Jieping (Thesis advisor) / Xue, Guoliang (Thesis advisor) / He, Jingrui (Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Li, Jing (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017