Sparsity regularization via tree-structured environments for disentangled representations

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Layne, Elliot, Hartford, Jason, Lachapelle, Sébastien, Blanchette, Mathieu, Sridhar, Dhanya
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Layne, Elliot
Hartford, Jason
Lachapelle, Sébastien
Blanchette, Mathieu
Sridhar, Dhanya
author_facet Layne, Elliot
Hartford, Jason
Lachapelle, Sébastien
Blanchette, Mathieu
Sridhar, Dhanya
contents Many causal systems such as biological processes in cells can only be observed indirectly via measurements, such as gene expression. Causal representation learning -- the task of correctly mapping low-level observations to latent causal variables -- could advance scientific understanding by enabling inference of latent variables such as pathway activation. In this paper, we develop methods for inferring latent variables from multiple related datasets (environments) and tasks. As a running example, we consider the task of predicting a phenotype from gene expression, where we often collect data from multiple cell types or organisms that are related in known ways. The key insight is that the mapping from latent variables driven by gene expression to the phenotype of interest changes sparsely across closely related environments. To model sparse changes, we introduce Tree-Based Regularization (TBR), an objective that minimizes both prediction error and regularizes closely related environments to learn similar predictors. We prove that under assumptions about the degree of sparse changes, TBR identifies the true latent variables up to some simple transformations. We evaluate the theory empirically with both simulations and ground-truth gene expression data. We find that TBR recovers the latent causal variables better than related methods across these settings, even under settings that violate some assumptions of the theory.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_20482
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Sparsity regularization via tree-structured environments for disentangled representations
Layne, Elliot
Hartford, Jason
Lachapelle, Sébastien
Blanchette, Mathieu
Sridhar, Dhanya
Machine Learning
Many causal systems such as biological processes in cells can only be observed indirectly via measurements, such as gene expression. Causal representation learning -- the task of correctly mapping low-level observations to latent causal variables -- could advance scientific understanding by enabling inference of latent variables such as pathway activation. In this paper, we develop methods for inferring latent variables from multiple related datasets (environments) and tasks. As a running example, we consider the task of predicting a phenotype from gene expression, where we often collect data from multiple cell types or organisms that are related in known ways. The key insight is that the mapping from latent variables driven by gene expression to the phenotype of interest changes sparsely across closely related environments. To model sparse changes, we introduce Tree-Based Regularization (TBR), an objective that minimizes both prediction error and regularizes closely related environments to learn similar predictors. We prove that under assumptions about the degree of sparse changes, TBR identifies the true latent variables up to some simple transformations. We evaluate the theory empirically with both simulations and ground-truth gene expression data. We find that TBR recovers the latent causal variables better than related methods across these settings, even under settings that violate some assumptions of the theory.
title Sparsity regularization via tree-structured environments for disentangled representations
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.20482