Unsupervised Discovery of Sparse Multimodal Representations in High Dimensional Data
share
Extracting an understanding of the underlying system from high dimensional data is a growing problem in science. One primary challenge involves clustering the data points into classes with interpretable differences. A challenge in clustering high dimensional data is that multimodal signatures that define clusters may only be present in a small but unknown subspace. Discovering the subspace that defines clusters provides low dimensional representations of the data which capture cluster diversity, and provides greater understanding of the system by identifying the key underlying variables. Here, we define a class of problems in which linear separability of clusters is hidden in a low dimensional space. We propose an unsupervised model-free method to identify the subset of features that define a low dimensional subspace in which clustering can be conducted. This is achieved by averaging over discriminators trained on an ensemble of proposed cluster configurations. We then apply our method to single cell RNA-seq data from mouse gastrulation, and identify 27 key transcription factors (out of 409 total), 18 of which are known to define cell states through their expression levels. In this inferred subspace, we find clear signatures of known cell types that eluded classification prior to discovery of the correct low dimensional subspace. This method can be used as a wrapper for existing clustering algorithms to find low dimensional informative subspaces with multimodal signatures within high dimensional data.
READ FULL TEXT