Nonparanormal graph quilting with applications to calcium imaging

Abstract

Probabilistic graphical models have become an important unsupervised learning tool for detecting network structures for a variety of problems, including the estimation of functional neuronal connectivity from two‐photon calcium imaging data. However, in the context of calcium imaging, technological limitations only allow for partially overlapping layers of neurons in a brain region of interest to be jointly recorded. In this case, graph estimation for the full data requires inference for edge selection when many pairs of neurons have no simultaneous observations. This leads to the graph quilting problem, which seeks to estimate a graph in the presence of block‐missingness in the empirical covariance matrix. Solutions for the graph quilting problem have previously been studied for Gaussian graphical models; however, neural activity data from calcium imaging are often non‐Gaussian, thereby requiring a more flexible modelling approach. Thus, in our work, we study two approaches for nonparanormal graph quilting based on the Gaussian copula graphical model, namely, a maximum likelihood procedure and a low rank‐based framework. We provide theoretical guarantees on edge recovery for the former approach under similar conditions to those previously developed for the Gaussian setting, and we investigate the empirical performance of both methods using simulations as well as real data calcium imaging data. Our approaches yield more scientifically meaningful functional connectivity estimates compared to existing Gaussian graph quilting methods for this calcium imaging data set.