Antonio Artés-Rodríguez

María Martínez-García, Fernando Moreno-Pino, Pablo M. Olmos et al.

Sleep constitutes a key indicator of human health, performance, and quality of life. Sleep deprivation has long been related to the onset, development, and worsening of several mental and metabolic disorders, constituting an essential marker for preventing, evaluating, and treating different health conditions. Sleep Activity Recognition methods can provide indicators to assess, monitor, and characterize subjects' sleep-wake cycles and detect behavioral changes. In this work, we propose a general method that continuously operates on passively sensed data from smartphones to characterize sleep and identify significant sleep episodes. Thanks to their ubiquity, these devices constitute an excellent alternative data source to profile subjects' biorhythms in a continuous, objective, and non-invasive manner, in contrast to traditional sleep assessment methods that usually rely on intrusive and subjective procedures. A Heterogeneous Hidden Markov Model is used to model a discrete latent variable process associated with the Sleep Activity Recognition task in a self-supervised way. We validate our results against sleep metrics reported by tested wearables, proving the effectiveness of the proposed approach and advocating its use to assess sleep without more reliable sources.

Fernando Moreno-Pino, María Martínez-García, Pablo M. Olmos et al.

Psychiatric patients' passive activity monitoring is crucial to detect behavioural shifts in real-time, comprising a tool that helps clinicians supervise patients' evolution over time and enhance the associated treatments' outcomes. Frequently, sleep disturbances and mental health deterioration are closely related, as mental health condition worsening regularly entails shifts in the patients' circadian rhythms. Therefore, Sleep Activity Recognition constitutes a behavioural marker to portray patients' activity cycles and to detect behavioural changes among them. Moreover, mobile passively sensed data captured from smartphones, thanks to these devices' ubiquity, constitute an excellent alternative to profile patients' biorhythm. In this work, we aim to identify major sleep episodes based on passively sensed data. To do so, a Heterogeneous Hidden Markov Model is proposed to model a discrete latent variable process associated with the Sleep Activity Recognition task in a self-supervised way. We validate our results against sleep metrics reported by clinically tested wearables, proving the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Fernando Moreno-Pino, Emese Sükei, Pablo M. Olmos et al.

We introduce PyHHMM, an object-oriented open-source Python implementation of Heterogeneous-Hidden Markov Models (HHMMs). In addition to HMM's basic core functionalities, such as different initialization algorithms and classical observations models, i.e., continuous and multinoulli, PyHHMM distinctively emphasizes features not supported in similar available frameworks: a heterogeneous observation model, missing data inference, different model order selection criterias, and semi-supervised training. These characteristics result in a feature-rich implementation for researchers working with sequential data. PyHHMM relies on the numpy, scipy, scikit-learn, and seaborn Python packages, and is distributed under the Apache-2.0 License. PyHHMM's source code is publicly available on Github (https://github.com/fmorenopino/HeterogeneousHMM) to facilitate adoptions and future contributions. A detailed documentation (https://pyhhmm.readthedocs.io/en/latest), which covers examples of use and models' theoretical explanation, is available. The package can be installed through the Python Package Index (PyPI), via 'pip install pyhhmm'.

Rodrigo Oliver, Josué Pérez-Sabater, Leire Paz-Arbaizar et al.

Foundation models have achieved remarkable success across various domains, yet their adoption in healthcare remains limited. While significant advances have been made in medical imaging, genetic biomarkers, and time series from electronic health records, the potential of foundation models for patient behavior monitoring through personal digital devices remains underexplored. The data generated by these devices are inherently heterogeneous, multisource, and often exhibit high rates of missing data, posing unique challenges. This paper introduces a novel foundation model based on a modified vector quantized variational autoencoder, specifically designed to process real-world data from smartphones and wearable devices. We leveraged the discrete latent representation of this model to effectively perform two downstream tasks, suicide risk assessment and emotional state prediction, on different held-out clinical cohorts without the need of fine-tuning. We also highlight the existence of a trade-off between discrete and continuous latent structures, suggesting that hybrid models may be optimal for balancing accuracy across various supervised and unsupervised tasks.

Pablo Moreno-Muñoz, Antonio Artés-Rodríguez, Mauricio A. Álvarez

We present a framework for transfer learning based on modular variational Gaussian processes (GP). We develop a module-based method that having a dictionary of well fitted GPs, one could build ensemble GP models without revisiting any data. Each model is characterised by its hyperparameters, pseudo-inputs and their corresponding posterior densities. Our method avoids undesired data centralisation, reduces rising computational costs and allows the transfer of learned uncertainty metrics after training. We exploit the augmentation of high-dimensional integral operators based on the Kullback-Leibler divergence between stochastic processes to introduce an efficient lower bound under all the sparse variational GPs, with different complexity and even likelihood distribution. The method is also valid for multi-output GPs, learning correlations a posteriori between independent modules. Extensive results illustrate the usability of our framework in large-scale and multi-task experiments, also compared with the exact inference methods in the literature.

Aurora Cobo Aguilera, Pablo Martínez Olmos, Antonio Artés-Rodríguez et al.

Language models (LM) have grown with non-stop in the last decade, from sequence-to-sequence architectures to the state-of-the-art and utter attention-based Transformers. In this work, we demonstrate how the inclusion of deep generative models within BERT can bring more versatile models, able to impute missing/noisy words with richer text or even improve BLEU score. More precisely, we use a Gaussian Mixture Variational Autoencoder (GMVAE) as a regularizer layer and prove its effectiveness not only in Transformers but also in the most relevant encoder-decoder based LM, seq2seq with and without attention.

Fernando Moreno-Pino, Pablo M. Olmos, Antonio Artés-Rodríguez

Time series forecasting is an important problem across many domains, playing a crucial role in multiple real-world applications. In this paper, we propose a forecasting architecture that combines deep autoregressive models with a Spectral Attention (SA) module, which merges global and local frequency domain information in the model's embedded space. By characterizing in the spectral domain the embedding of the time series as occurrences of a random process, our method can identify global trends and seasonality patterns. Two spectral attention models, global and local to the time series, integrate this information within the forecast and perform spectral filtering to remove time series's noise. The proposed architecture has a number of useful properties: it can be effectively incorporated into well-know forecast architectures, requiring a low number of parameters and producing interpretable results that improve forecasting accuracy. We test the Spectral Attention Autoregressive Model (SAAM) on several well-know forecast datasets, consistently demonstrating that our model compares favorably to state-of-the-art approaches.

Daniel Barrejón, Pablo M. Olmos, Antonio Artés-Rodríguez

Medical data sets are usually corrupted by noise and missing data. These missing patterns are commonly assumed to be completely random, but in medical scenarios, the reality is that these patterns occur in bursts due to sensors that are off for some time or data collected in a misaligned uneven fashion, among other causes. This paper proposes to model medical data records with heterogeneous data types and bursty missing data using sequential variational autoencoders (VAEs). In particular, we propose a new methodology, the Shi-VAE, which extends the capabilities of VAEs to sequential streams of data with missing observations. We compare our model against state-of-the-art solutions in an intensive care unit database (ICU) and a dataset of passive human monitoring. Furthermore, we find that standard error metrics such as RMSE are not conclusive enough to assess temporal models and include in our analysis the cross-correlation between the ground truth and the imputed signal. We show that Shi-VAE achieves the best performance in terms of using both metrics, with lower computational complexity than the GP-VAE model, which is the state-of-the-art method for medical records.

Ignacio Peis, Pablo M. Olmos, Antonio Artés-Rodríguez

We present a novel deep generative model based on non i.i.d. variational autoencoders that captures global dependencies among observations in a fully unsupervised fashion. In contrast to the recent semi-supervised alternatives for global modeling in deep generative models, our approach combines a mixture model in the local or data-dependent space and a global Gaussian latent variable, which lead us to obtain three particular insights. First, the induced latent global space captures interpretable disentangled representations with no user-defined regularization in the evidence lower bound (as in $β$-VAE and its generalizations). Second, we show that the model performs domain alignment to find correlations and interpolate between different databases. Finally, we study the ability of the global space to discriminate between groups of observations with non-trivial underlying structures, such as face images with shared attributes or defined sequences of digits images.

Pablo Moreno-Muñoz, Lorena Romero-Medrano, Ángela Moreno et al.

More than one million people commit suicide every year worldwide. The costs of daily cares, social stigma and treatment issues are still hard barriers to overcome in mental health. Most symptoms of mental disorders are related to the behavioral state of a patient, such as the mobility or social activity. Mobile-based technologies allow the passive collection of patients data, which supplements conventional assessments that rely on biased questionnaires and occasional medical appointments. In this work, we present a non-invasive machine learning (ML) model to detect behavioral shifts in psychiatric patients from unobtrusive data collected by a smartphone app. Our clinically validated results shed light on the idea of an early detection mobile tool for the task of suicide attempt prevention.

Pablo Moreno-Muñoz, Antonio Artés-Rodríguez, Mauricio A. Álvarez

We present a new framework for recycling independent variational approximations to Gaussian processes. The main contribution is the construction of variational ensembles given a dictionary of fitted Gaussian processes without revisiting any subset of observations. Our framework allows for regression, classification and heterogeneous tasks, i.e. mix of continuous and discrete variables over the same input domain. We exploit infinite-dimensional integral operators based on the Kullback-Leibler divergence between stochastic processes to re-combine arbitrary amounts of variational sparse approximations with different complexity, likelihood model and location of the pseudo-inputs. Extensive results illustrate the usability of our framework in large-scale distributed experiments, also compared with the exact inference models in the literature.

Lorena Romero-Medrano, Pablo Moreno-Muñoz, Antonio Artés-Rodríguez

Bayesian change-point detection, together with latent variable models, allows to perform segmentation over high-dimensional time-series. We assume that change-points lie on a lower-dimensional manifold where we aim to infer subsets of discrete latent variables. For this model, full inference is computationally unfeasible and pseudo-observations based on point-estimates are used instead. However, if estimation is not certain enough, change-point detection gets affected. To circumvent this problem, we propose a multinomial sampling methodology that improves the detection rate and reduces the delay while keeping complexity stable and inference analytically tractable. Our experiments show results that outperform the baseline method and we also provide an example oriented to a human behavior study.

Aurora Cobo Aguilera, Antonio Artés-Rodríguez, Fernando Pérez-Cruz et al.

Deep learning requires regularization mechanisms to reduce overfitting and improve generalization. We address this problem by a new regularization method based on distributional robust optimization. The key idea is to modify the contribution from each sample for tightening the empirical risk bound. During the stochastic training, the selection of samples is done according to their accuracy in such a way that the worst performed samples are the ones that contribute the most in the optimization. We study different scenarios and show the ones where it can make the convergence faster or increase the accuracy.

Ignacio Peis, Pablo M. Olmos, Constanza Vera-Varela et al.

This article presents a novel method for predicting suicidal ideation from Electronic Health Records (EHR) and Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) data using deep sequential models. Both EHR longitudinal data and EMA question forms are defined by asynchronous, variable length, randomly-sampled data sequences. In our method, we model each of them with a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), and both sequences are aligned by concatenating the hidden state of each of them using temporal marks. Furthermore, we incorporate attention schemes to improve performance in long sequences and time-independent pre-trained schemes to cope with very short sequences. Using a database of 1023 patients, our experimental results show that the addition of EMA records boosts the system recall to predict the suicidal ideation diagnosis from 48.13% obtained exclusively from EHR-based state-of-the-art methods to 67.78%. Additionally, our method provides interpretability through the t-SNE representation of the latent space. Further, the most relevant input features are identified and interpreted medically.

Pablo Moreno-Muñoz, Antonio Artés-Rodríguez, Mauricio A. Álvarez

We address the problem of continual learning in multi-task Gaussian process (GP) models for handling sequential input-output observations. Our approach extends the existing prior-posterior recursion of online Bayesian inference, i.e.\ past posterior discoveries become future prior beliefs, to the infinite functional space setting of GP. For a reason of scalability, we introduce variational inference together with an sparse approximation based on inducing inputs. As a consequence, we obtain tractable continual lower-bounds where two novel Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergences intervene in a natural way. The key technical property of our method is the recursive reconstruction of conditional GP priors conditioned on the variational parameters learned so far. To achieve this goal, we introduce a novel factorization of past variational distributions, where the predictive GP equation propagates the posterior uncertainty forward. We then demonstrate that it is possible to derive GP models over many types of sequential observations, either discrete or continuous and amenable to stochastic optimization. The continual inference approach is also applicable to scenarios where potential multi-channel or heterogeneous observations might appear. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the method is fully scalable, shows a reliable performance and is robust to uncertainty error propagation over a plenty of synthetic and real-world datasets.

Pablo Moreno-Muñoz, David Ramírez, Antonio Artés-Rodríguez

Change-point detection (CPD) aims to locate abrupt transitions in the generative model of a sequence of observations. When Bayesian methods are considered, the standard practice is to infer the posterior distribution of the change-point locations. However, for complex models (high-dimensional or heterogeneous), it is not possible to perform reliable detection. To circumvent this problem, we propose to use a hierarchical model, which yields observations that belong to a lower-dimensional manifold. Concretely, we consider a latent-class model with an unbounded number of categories, which is based on the chinese-restaurant process (CRP). For this model we derive a continual learning mechanism that is based on the sequential construction of the CRP and the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm with a stochastic maximization step. Our results show that the proposed method is able to recursively infer the number of underlying latent classes and perform CPD in a reliable manner.

Pablo Moreno-Muñoz, David Ramírez, Antonio Artés-Rodríguez

This paper addresses the problem of change-point detection on sequences of high-dimensional and heterogeneous observations, which also possess a periodic temporal structure. Due to the dimensionality problem, when the time between change-points is on the order of the dimension of the model parameters, drifts in the underlying distribution can be misidentified as changes. To overcome this limitation, we assume that the observations lie in a lower-dimensional manifold that admits a latent variable representation. In particular, we propose a hierarchical model that is computationally feasible, widely applicable to heterogeneous data and robust to missing instances. Additionally, the observations' periodic dependencies are captured by non-stationary periodic covariance functions. The proposed technique is particularly fitted to (and motivated by) the problem of detecting changes in human behavior using smartphones and its application to relapse detection in psychiatric patients. Finally, we validate the technique on synthetic examples and we demonstrate its utility in the detection of behavioral changes using real data acquired by smartphones.

Pablo Moreno-Muñoz, Antonio Artés-Rodríguez, Mauricio A. Álvarez

We present a novel extension of multi-output Gaussian processes for handling heterogeneous outputs. We assume that each output has its own likelihood function and use a vector-valued Gaussian process prior to jointly model the parameters in all likelihoods as latent functions. Our multi-output Gaussian process uses a covariance function with a linear model of coregionalisation form. Assuming conditional independence across the underlying latent functions together with an inducing variable framework, we are able to obtain tractable variational bounds amenable to stochastic variational inference. We illustrate the performance of the model on synthetic data and two real datasets: a human behavioral study and a demographic high-dimensional dataset.

Francisco Hernando-Gallego, Antonio Artés-Rodríguez

The relation between performance and stress is described by the Yerkes-Dodson Law but varies significantly between individuals. This paper describes a method for determining the individual optimal performance as a function of physiological signals. The method is based on attention and reasoning tests of increasing complexity under monitoring of three physiological signals: Galvanic Skin Response (GSR), Heart Rate (HR), and Electromyogram (EMG). Based on the test results with 15 different individuals, we first show that two of the signals, GSR and HR, have enough discriminative power to distinguish between relax and stress periods. We then show a positive correlation between the complexity level of the tests and the GSR and HR signals, and we finally determine the optimal performance point as the signal level just before a performance decrease. We also discuss the differences among signals depending on the type of test.

Pablo G. Moreno, Yee Whye Teh, Fernando Perez-Cruz et al.

Crowdsourcing has been proven to be an effective and efficient tool to annotate large datasets. User annotations are often noisy, so methods to combine the annotations to produce reliable estimates of the ground truth are necessary. We claim that considering the existence of clusters of users in this combination step can improve the performance. This is especially important in early stages of crowdsourcing implementations, where the number of annotations is low. At this stage there is not enough information to accurately estimate the bias introduced by each annotator separately, so we have to resort to models that consider the statistical links among them. In addition, finding these clusters is interesting in itself as knowing the behavior of the pool of annotators allows implementing efficient active learning strategies. Based on this, we propose in this paper two new fully unsupervised models based on a Chinese Restaurant Process (CRP) prior and a hierarchical structure that allows inferring these groups jointly with the ground truth and the properties of the users. Efficient inference algorithms based on Gibbs sampling with auxiliary variables are proposed. Finally, we perform experiments, both on synthetic and real databases, to show the advantages of our models over state-of-the-art algorithms.