No abstract

We propose a novel unsupervised learning algorithm to extract the layout of an image by learning latent object-related aspects. Unlike traditional image segmentation algorithms that segment an image using feature similarity, our method is able to learn high-level object characteristics (aspects) from a large number of unlabeled images containing similar objects to facilitate image segmentation. Our method does not require human to annotate the training set and works without supervision. We use a graphical model to address the learning of aspects and layout extraction together. In particular, aspectfeature dependency from multiple images is learned via the Expectation-Maximization algorithm. We demonstrate that, by associating latent aspects to spatial structure, the proposed method achieves much better layout extraction results than using Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis.

Training

Subject clustering (i.e., the use of measured features to cluster subjects, such as patients or cells, into multiple groups) is a problem of significant interest. In recent years, many approaches have been proposed, among which unsupervised deep learning (UDL) has received much attention. Two interesting questions are 1) how to combine the strengths of UDL and other approaches and 2) how these approaches compare to each other. We combine the variational auto-encoder (VAE), a popular UDL approach, with the recent idea of influential feature-principal component analysis (IF-PCA) and propose IF-VAE as a new method for subject clustering. We study IF-VAE and compare it with several other methods (including IF-PCA, VAE, Seurat, and SC3) on 10 gene microarray data sets and eight single-cell RNA-seq data sets. We find that IF-VAE shows significant improvement over VAE, but still underperforms compared to IF-PCA. We also find that IF-PCA is quite competitive, slightly outperforming Seurat and SC3 over the eight single-cell data sets. IF-PCA is conceptually simple and permits delicate analysis. We demonstrate that IF-PCA is capable of achieving phase transition in a rare/weak model. Comparatively, Seurat and SC3 are more complex and theoretically difficult to analyze (for these reasons, their optimality remains unclear).