Seminar Details
2008-11-04 (14.00) : "Unsupervised methods for multivariate data analysis"
At Euler
Organized by Mathematical Engineering
Speaker :
Cosmin LAZAR (University Reims, France)
Abstract :
Multivariate data analysis gathers efficient tools for extracting reliable information in order to comprehend the phenomenon in study. Gathering data into groups or classes according to some similarity criteria is an essential step in the analysis. Intrinsic dimension or dimension reduction of multivariate data, the choice of the similarity criterion, cluster validation are problems which still let open questions.
This work tries to make a step further concerning two of the problems mentioned above: the choice of the similarity measure for data clustering and the dimension reduction of multivariate data. The choice of the similarity measure for data clustering is investigated from the concentration phenomenon of metrics point of view. Non Euclidean metrics are tested as alternative to the classical Euclidian distance as similarity measure. We tested if less concentrated metrics are more discriminative for multivariate data clustering. We also proposed indices which take into account the inter-classes distance (e.g. Davies-Bouldin index) in order to find the optimal metric when the classes are supposed to be Gaussian.
Blind Source Separation (BSS) methods are also investigated for dimension reduction of multivariate data. A BSS method based on a geometrical interpretation of the linear mixing model is proposed. BSS methods which take into account application constraints are used for dimension reduction in two different applications of multivariate imaging. These methods allow the extraction of meaningful factors from the whole data set; they also allow reducing the complexity and the computing time of the clustering algorithms which are used further in analysis.