Thibault Espinasse

Hugues Van Assel, Thibault Espinasse, Julien Chiquet et al.

Most popular dimension reduction (DR) methods like t-SNE and UMAP are based on minimizing a cost between input and latent pairwise similarities. Though widely used, these approaches lack clear probabilistic foundations to enable a full understanding of their properties and limitations. To that extent, we introduce a unifying statistical framework based on the coupling of hidden graphs using cross entropy. These graphs induce a Markov random field dependency structure among the observations in both input and latent spaces. We show that existing pairwise similarity DR methods can be retrieved from our framework with particular choices of priors for the graphs. Moreover this reveals that these methods suffer from a statistical deficiency that explains poor performances in conserving coarse-grain dependencies. Our model is leveraged and extended to address this issue while new links are drawn with Laplacian eigenmaps and PCA.

Yohann De Castro, Thibault Espinasse, Paul Rochet

In this paper, we aim at recovering an undirected weighted graph of $N$ vertices from the knowledge of a perturbed version of the eigenspaces of its adjacency matrix $W$. For instance, this situation arises for stationary signals on graphs or for Markov chains observed at random times. Our approach is based on minimizing a cost function given by the Frobenius norm of the commutator $\mathsf{A} \mathsf{B}-\mathsf{B} \mathsf{A}$ between symmetric matrices $\mathsf{A}$ and $\mathsf{B}$. In the Erdős-Rényi model with no self-loops, we show that identifiability (i.e., the ability to reconstruct $W$ from the knowledge of its eigenspaces) follows a sharp phase transition on the expected number of edges with threshold function $N\log N/2$. Given an estimation of the eigenspaces based on a $n$-sample, we provide support selection procedures from theoretical and practical point of views. In particular, when deleting an edge from the active support, our study unveils that our test statistic is the order of $\mathcal O(1/n)$ when we overestimate the true support and lower bounded by a positive constant when the estimated support is smaller than the true support. This feature leads to a powerful practical support estimation procedure. Simulated and real life numerical experiments assert our new methodology.