T-distributed Stochastic Neighbor Network for unsupervised representation learning.

Journal: Neural networks : the official journal of the International Neural Network Society
PMID:

Abstract

Unsupervised representation learning (URL) is still lack of a reasonable operator (e.g. convolution kernel) for exploring meaningful structural information from generic data including vector, image and tabular data. In this paper, we propose a simple end-to-end T-distributed Stochastic Neighbor Network (TsNet) for URL with clustering downstream task. Concretely, our TsNet model has three major components: (1) an adaptive connectivity distribution learning module is presented to construct a pairwise graph for preserving the local structure of generic data; (2) a T-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding based loss function is designed to learn a transformation between embeddings and original data, which improves the discrimination of representations; (3) a nonlinear parametric mapping is learned via our TsNet on an unsupervised generalized manner, which can address the "out-of-sample" issue. By combining these components, our method is able to considerably outperform previous related unsupervised learning approaches on visualization and clustering of generic data. A simple deep neural network equipped on our model respectively achieves 74.90%, 76.56% ACC and NMI, which is 8% relative improvement over previous state-of-the-art on real single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) datasets clustering.

Authors

  • Zheng Wang
    Department of Infectious Diseases, Renmin Hospital of Wuhan University, Wuhan 430060, China.
  • Jiaxi Xie
    School of Artificial Intelligence, Optics and Electronics (iOPEN), Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an 710072, Shaanxi, PR China. Electronic address: xie981224@gmail.com.
  • Feiping Nie
    School of Computer Science and Center for OPTical IMagery Analysis and Learning (OPTIMAL), Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an 710072, Shaanxi, PR China.
  • Rong Wang
    College of Food Science and Engineering, Northwest A&F University, Yangling 712100, Shanxi, China. Electronic address: wangrong91@nwsuaf.edu.cn.
  • Yanyan Jia
    Department of Nuclear Medicine, Shanghai Tenth People's Hospital, School of Medicine, Tongji University, Shanghai, China.
  • Shichang Liu
    Department of Orthopedics, Honghui Hospital Affiliated to Medical College of Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an Shanxi, 710054, P.R.China.