Marina Evangelou

Fabio Feser, Marina Evangelou

Tuning the regularization parameter in penalized regression models is an expensive task, requiring multiple models to be fit along a path of parameters. Strong screening rules drastically reduce computational costs by lowering the dimensionality of the input prior to fitting. We develop strong screening rules for group-based Sorted L-One Penalized Estimation (SLOPE) models: Group SLOPE and Sparse-group SLOPE. The developed rules are applicable to the wider family of group-based OWL models, including OSCAR. Our experiments on both synthetic and real data show that the screening rules significantly accelerate the fitting process. The screening rules make it accessible for group SLOPE and sparse-group SLOPE to be applied to high-dimensional datasets, particularly those encountered in genetics.

Ella S. C. Orme, Marina Evangelou, Ulrich Paquet

Multi-view data from the same source often exhibit correlation. This is mirrored in correlation between the latent spaces of separate variational autoencoders (VAEs) trained on each data-view. A multi-view VAE approach is proposed that incorporates a joint prior with a non-zero correlation structure between the latent spaces of the VAEs. By enforcing such correlation structure, more strongly correlated latent spaces are uncovered. Using conditional distributions to move between these latent spaces, missing views can be imputed and used for downstream analysis. Learning this correlation structure involves maintaining validity of the prior distribution, as well as a successful parameterization that allows end-to-end learning.

Michael Komodromos, Marina Evangelou, Sarah Filippi

Variational logistic regression is a popular method for approximate Bayesian inference seeing wide-spread use in many areas of machine learning including: Bayesian optimization, reinforcement learning and multi-instance learning to name a few. However, due to the intractability of the Evidence Lower Bound, authors have turned to the use of Monte Carlo, quadrature or bounds to perform inference, methods which are costly or give poor approximations to the true posterior. In this paper we introduce a new bound for the expectation of softplus function and subsequently show how this can be applied to variational logistic regression and Gaussian process classification. Unlike other bounds, our proposal does not rely on extending the variational family, or introducing additional parameters to ensure the bound is tight. In fact, we show that this bound is tighter than the state-of-the-art, and that the resulting variational posterior achieves state-of-the-art performance, whilst being significantly faster to compute than Monte-Carlo methods.

Michael Komodromos, Eric Aboagye, Marina Evangelou et al.

Few Bayesian methods for analyzing high-dimensional sparse survival data provide scalable variable selection, effect estimation and uncertainty quantification. Such methods often either sacrifice uncertainty quantification by computing maximum a posteriori estimates, or quantify the uncertainty at high (unscalable) computational expense. We bridge this gap and develop an interpretable and scalable Bayesian proportional hazards model for prediction and variable selection, referred to as SVB. Our method, based on a mean-field variational approximation, overcomes the high computational cost of MCMC whilst retaining useful features, providing a posterior distribution for the parameters and offering a natural mechanism for variable selection via posterior inclusion probabilities. The performance of our proposed method is assessed via extensive simulations and compared against other state-of-the-art Bayesian variable selection methods, demonstrating comparable or better performance. Finally, we demonstrate how the proposed method can be used for variable selection on two transcriptomic datasets with censored survival outcomes, and how the uncertainty quantification offered by our method can be used to provide an interpretable assessment of patient risk.

Theodoulos Rodosthenous, Vahid Shahrezaei, Marina Evangelou

An increasing number of multi-view data are being published by studies in several fields. This type of data corresponds to multiple data-views, each representing a different aspect of the same set of samples. We have recently proposed multi-SNE, an extension of t-SNE, that produces a single visualisation of multi-view data. The multi-SNE approach provides low-dimensional embeddings of the samples, produced by being updated iteratively through the different data-views. Here, we further extend multi-SNE to a semi-supervised approach, that classifies unlabelled samples by regarding the labelling information as an extra data-view. We look deeper into the performance, limitations and strengths of multi-SNE and its extension, S-multi-SNE, by applying the two methods on various multi-view datasets with different challenges. We show that by including the labelling information, the projection of the samples improves drastically and it is accompanied by a strong classification performance.

Theodoulos Rodosthenous, Vahid Shahrezaei, Marina Evangelou

Non-linear dimensionality reduction can be performed by \textit{manifold learning} approaches, such as Stochastic Neighbour Embedding (SNE), Locally Linear Embedding (LLE) and Isometric Feature Mapping (ISOMAP). These methods aim to produce two or three latent embeddings, primarily to visualise the data in intelligible representations. This manuscript proposes extensions of Student's t-distributed SNE (t-SNE), LLE and ISOMAP, for dimensionality reduction and visualisation of multi-view data. Multi-view data refers to multiple types of data generated from the same samples. The proposed multi-view approaches provide more comprehensible projections of the samples compared to the ones obtained by visualising each data-view separately. Commonly visualisation is used for identifying underlying patterns within the samples. By incorporating the obtained low-dimensional embeddings from the multi-view manifold approaches into the K-means clustering algorithm, it is shown that clusters of the samples are accurately identified. Through the analysis of real and synthetic data the proposed multi-SNE approach is found to have the best performance. We further illustrate the applicability of the multi-SNE approach for the analysis of multi-omics single-cell data, where the aim is to visualise and identify cell heterogeneity and cell types in biological tissues relevant to health and disease.