Portrait de Guy Wolf

Guy Wolf

Membre académique principal
Chaire en IA Canada-CIFAR
Professeur agrégé, Université de Montréal, Département de mathématiques et statistiques
Concordia University
CHUM - Montreal University Hospital Center
Sujets de recherche
Apprentissage automatique médical
Apprentissage de représentations
Apprentissage multimodal
Apprentissage profond
Apprentissage spectral
Apprentissage sur graphes
Exploration des données
Modélisation moléculaire
Recherche d'information
Réseaux de neurones en graphes
Systèmes dynamiques
Théorie de l'apprentissage automatique

Biographie

Guy Wolf est professeur agrégé au Département de mathématiques et de statistique de l'Université de Montréal. Ses intérêts de recherche se situent au carrefour de l'apprentissage automatique, de la science des données et des mathématiques appliquées. Il s'intéresse particulièrement aux méthodes d'exploration de données qui utilisent l'apprentissage multiple et l'apprentissage géométrique profond, ainsi qu'aux applications pour l'analyse exploratoire des données biomédicales.

Ses recherches portent sur l'analyse exploratoire des données, avec des applications en bio-informatique. Ses approches sont multidisciplinaires et combinent l'apprentissage automatique, le traitement du signal et les outils mathématiques appliqués. En particulier, ses travaux récents utilisent une combinaison de géométries de diffusion et d'apprentissage profond pour trouver des modèles émergents, des dynamiques et des structures dans les mégadonnées à grande dimension (par exemple, dans la génomique et la protéomique de la cellule unique).

Étudiants actuels

Doctorat - UdeM
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - Yale University
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice alumni
Maîtrise recherche - Concordia
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Doctorat - Concordia
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Doctorat - UdeM
Doctorat - UdeM
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Maîtrise recherche - Concordia
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Doctorat - UdeM
Collaborateur·rice de recherche
Doctorat - UdeM
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Postdoctorat - Concordia
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Doctorat - UdeM
Doctorat - Concordia
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Maîtrise recherche - UdeM
Doctorat - UdeM
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Doctorat - UdeM
Maîtrise recherche - UdeM
Doctorat - McGill
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Postdoctorat - UdeM
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - McGill (assistant professor)

Publications

Data Imputation with an Autoencoder and MAGIC
Devin Eddington
Andres Felipe Duque Correa
Kevin R. Moon
Missing data is a common problem in many applications. Imputing missing values is a challenging task, as the imputations need to be accurate… (voir plus) and robust to avoid introducing bias in downstream analysis. In this paper, we propose an ensemble method that combines the strengths of a manifold learning-based imputation method called MAGIC and an autoencoder deep learning model. We call our method Deep MAGIC. Deep MAGIC is trained on a linear combination of the mean squared error of the original data and the mean squared error of the MAGIC-imputed data. Experimental results on three benchmark datasets show that Deep MAGIC outperforms several state-of-the-art imputation methods, demonstrating its effectiveness and robustness in handling large amounts of missing data.
Graph Fourier MMD for Signals on Graphs
While numerous methods have been proposed for computing distances between probability distributions in Euclidean space, relatively little at… (voir plus)tention has been given to computing such distances for distributions on graphs. However, there has been a marked increase in data that either lies on graph (such as protein interaction networks) or can be modeled as a graph (single cell data), particularly in the biomedical sciences. Thus, it becomes important to find ways to compare signals defined on such graphs. Here, we propose Graph Fourier MMD (GFMMD), a novel distance between distributions and signals on graphs. GFMMD is defined via an optimal witness function that is both smooth on the graph and maximizes difference in expectation between the pair of distributions on the graph. We find an analytical solution to this optimization problem as well as an embedding of distributions that results from this method. We also prove several properties of this method including scale invariance and applicability to disconnected graphs. We showcase it on graph benchmark datasets as well on single cell RNA-sequencing data analysis. In the latter, we use the GFMMD-based gene embeddings to find meaningful gene clusters. We also propose a novel type of score for gene selection called "gene localization score" which helps select genes for cellular state space characterization.
Manifold Alignment with Label Information
Andres F. Duque Correa
Kevin R. Moon
Multi-domain data is becoming increasingly common and presents both challenges and opportunities in the data science community. The integrat… (voir plus)ion of distinct data-views can be used for exploratory data analysis, and benefit downstream analysis including machine learning related tasks. With this in mind, we present a novel manifold alignment method called MALI (Manifold alignment with label information) that learns a correspondence between two distinct domains. MALI belongs to a middle ground between the more commonly addressed semi-supervised manifold alignment, where some known correspondences between the two domains are assumed to be known beforehand, and the purely unsupervised case, where no information linking both domains is available. To do this, MALI learns the manifold structure in both domains via a diffusion process and then leverages discrete class labels to guide the alignment. MALI recovers a pairing and a common representation that reveals related samples in both domains. We show that MALI outperforms the current state-of-the-art manifold alignment methods across multiple datasets.
Single-cell analysis reveals inflammatory interactions driving macular degeneration
Manik Kuchroo
Marcello DiStasio
Eric Song
Eda Calapkulu
Maryam Ige
Amar H. Sheth
Abdelilah Majdoubi
Madhvi Menon
Abhinav Godavarthi
Yu Xing
Scott Gigante
Holly Steach
Janhavi Narain
Kisung You
George Mourgkos … (voir 6 de plus)
Rahul M. Dhodapkar
Matthew J. Hirn
Bastian Rieck
Brian P. Hafler
Due to commonalities in pathophysiology, age-related macular degeneration (AMD) represents a uniquely accessible model to investigate thera… (voir plus)pies for neurodegenerative diseases, leading us to examine whether pathways of disease progression are shared across neurodegenerative conditions. Here we use single-nucleus RNA sequencing to profile lesions from 11 postmortem human retinas with age-related macular degeneration and 6 control retinas with no history of retinal disease. We create a machine-learning pipeline based on recent advances in data geometry and topology and identify activated glial populations enriched in the early phase of disease. Examining single-cell data from Alzheimer’s disease and progressive multiple sclerosis with our pipeline, we find a similar glial activation profile enriched in the early phase of these neurodegenerative diseases. In late-stage age-related macular degeneration, we identify a microglia-to-astrocyte signaling axis mediated by interleukin-1β which drives angiogenesis characteristic of disease pathogenesis. We validated this mechanism using in vitro and in vivo assays in mouse, identifying a possible new therapeutic target for AMD and possibly other neurodegenerative conditions. Thus, due to shared glial states, the retina provides a potential system for investigating therapeutic approaches in neurodegenerative diseases.
Reliability of CKA as a Similarity Measure in Deep Learning
Comparing learned neural representations in neural networks is a challenging but important problem, which has been approached in different w… (voir plus)ays. The Centered Kernel Alignment (CKA) similarity metric, particularly its linear variant, has recently become a popular approach and has been widely used to compare representations of a network's different layers, of architecturally similar networks trained differently, or of models with different architectures trained on the same data. A wide variety of conclusions about similarity and dissimilarity of these various representations have been made using CKA. In this work we present analysis that formally characterizes CKA sensitivity to a large class of simple transformations, which can naturally occur in the context of modern machine learning. This provides a concrete explanation of CKA sensitivity to outliers, which has been observed in past works, and to transformations that preserve the linear separability of the data, an important generalization attribute. We empirically investigate several weaknesses of the CKA similarity metric, demonstrating situations in which it gives unexpected or counter-intuitive results. Finally we study approaches for modifying representations to maintain functional behaviour while changing the CKA value. Our results illustrate that, in many cases, the CKA value can be easily manipulated without substantial changes to the functional behaviour of the models, and call for caution when leveraging activation alignment metrics.
Conditional Flow Matching: Simulation-Free Dynamic Optimal Transport
Geodesic Sinkhorn for Fast and Accurate Optimal Transport on Manifolds
María Ramos Zapatero
Christopher J. Tape
Efficient computation of optimal transport distance between distributions is of growing importance in data science. Sinkhorn-based methods a… (voir plus)re currently the state-of-the-art for such computations, but require
A Heat Diffusion Perspective on Geodesic Preserving Dimensionality Reduction
Edward De Brouwer
Yanlei Zhang
Ian Adelstein
Diffusion-based manifold learning methods have proven useful in representation learning and dimensionality reduction of modern high dimensio… (voir plus)nal, high throughput, noisy datasets. Such datasets are especially present in fields like biology and physics. While it is thought that these methods preserve underlying manifold structure of data by learning a proxy for geodesic distances, no specific theoretical links have been established. Here, we establish such a link via results in Riemannian geometry explicitly connecting heat diffusion to manifold distances. In this process, we also formulate a more general heat kernel based manifold embedding method that we call heat geodesic embeddings. This novel perspective makes clearer the choices available in manifold learning and denoising. Results show that our method outperforms existing state of the art in preserving ground truth manifold distances, and preserving cluster structure in toy datasets. We also showcase our method on single cell RNA-sequencing datasets with both continuum and cluster structure, where our method enables interpolation of withheld timepoints of data. Finally, we show that parameters of our more general method can be configured to give results similar to PHATE (a state-of-the-art diffusion based manifold learning method) as well as SNE (an attraction/repulsion neighborhood based method that forms the basis of t-SNE).
Inferring dynamic regulatory interaction graphs from time series data with perturbations
Dhananjay Bhaskar
Sumner Magruder
Edward De Brouwer
Matheo Morales
Aarthi Venkat
Complex systems are characterized by intricate interactions between entities that evolve dynamically over time. Accurate inference of these … (voir plus)dynamic relationships is crucial for understanding and predicting system behavior. In this paper, we propose Regulatory Temporal Interaction Network Inference (RiTINI) for inferring time-varying interaction graphs in complex systems using a novel combination of space-and-time graph attentions and graph neural ordinary differential equations (ODEs). RiTINI leverages time-lapse signals on a graph prior, as well as perturbations of signals at various nodes in order to effectively capture the dynamics of the underlying system. This approach is distinct from traditional causal inference networks, which are limited to inferring acyclic and static graphs. In contrast, RiTINI can infer cyclic, directed, and time-varying graphs, providing a more comprehensive and accurate representation of complex systems. The graph attention mechanism in RiTINI allows the model to adaptively focus on the most relevant interactions in time and space, while the graph neural ODEs enable continuous-time modeling of the system's dynamics. We evaluate RiTINI's performance on various simulated and real-world datasets, demonstrating its state-of-the-art capability in inferring interaction graphs compared to previous methods.
Multi-view manifold learning of human brain-state trajectories.
Erica L. Busch
Andrew Benz
Tom Wallenstein
Nicholas B. Turk-Browne
The complexity of the human brain gives the illusion that brain activity is intrinsically high-dimensional. Nonlinear dimensionality-reducti… (voir plus)on methods such as uniform manifold approximation and t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding have been used for high-throughput biomedical data. However, they have not been used extensively for brain activity data such as those from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), primarily due to their inability to maintain dynamic structure. Here we introduce a nonlinear manifold learning method for time-series data—including those from fMRI—called temporal potential of heat-diffusion for affinity-based transition embedding (T-PHATE). In addition to recovering a low-dimensional intrinsic manifold geometry from time-series data, T-PHATE exploits the data’s autocorrelative structure to faithfully denoise and unveil dynamic trajectories. We empirically validate T-PHATE on three fMRI datasets, showing that it greatly improves data visualization, classification, and segmentation of the data relative to several other state-of-the-art dimensionality-reduction benchmarks. These improvements suggest many potential applications of T-PHATE to other high-dimensional datasets of temporally diffuse processes.
Understanding Graph Neural Networks with Generalized Geometric Scattering Transforms
Michael Perlmutter
Feng Gao
Matthew Hirn
The scattering transform is a multilayered wavelet-based deep learning architecture that acts as a model of convolutional neural networks. R… (voir plus)ecently, several works have introduced generalizations of the scattering transform for non-Euclidean settings such as graphs. Our work builds upon these constructions by introducing windowed and non-windowed geometric scattering transforms for graphs based upon a very general class of asymmetric wavelets. We show that these asymmetric graph scattering transforms have many of the same theoretical guarantees as their symmetric counterparts. As a result, the proposed construction unifies and extends known theoretical results for many of the existing graph scattering architectures. In doing so, this work helps bridge the gap between geometric scattering and other graph neural networks by introducing a large family of networks with provable stability and invariance guarantees. These results lay the groundwork for future deep learning architectures for graph-structured data that have learned filters and also provably have desirable theoretical properties.
Learning Shared Neural Manifolds from Multi-Subject fMRI Data
Erica L. Busch
Tom Wallenstein
Michal Gerasimiuk
Andrew Benz
Nicholas B. Turk-Browne
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is a notoriously noisy measurement of brain activity because of the large variations between in… (voir plus)dividuals, signals marred by environmental differences during collection, and spatiotemporal averaging required by the measurement resolution. In addition, the data is extremely high dimensional, with the space of the activity typically having much lower intrinsic dimension. In order to understand the connection between stimuli of interest and brain activity, and analyze differences and commonalities between subjects, it becomes important to learn a meaningful embedding of the data that denoises, and reveals its intrinsic structure. Specifically, we assume that while noise varies significantly between individuals, true responses to stimuli will share common, low-dimensional features between subjects which are jointly discoverable. Similar approaches have been exploited previously but they have mainly used linear methods such as PCA and shared response modeling (SRM). In contrast, we propose a neural network called MRMD-AE (manifold-regularized multiple decoder, autoencoder), that learns a common embedding from multiple subjects in an experiment while retaining the ability to decode to individual raw fMRI signals. We show that our learned common space represents an extensible manifold (where new points not seen during training can be mapped), improves the classification accuracy of stimulus features of unseen timepoints, as well as improves cross-subject translation of fMRI signals. We believe this framework can be used for many downstream applications such as guided brain-computer interface (BCI) training in the future.