论文标题
马尔可夫链蒙特卡洛方法用于动态因果模型的分层聚类
Markov chain Monte Carlo methods for hierarchical clustering of dynamic causal models
论文作者
论文摘要
在本文中,我们解决了将马尔可夫链蒙特卡洛(MCMC)应用于层次模型时,旨在在主题生成模型的潜在参数中执行聚类的层次模型。具体而言,我们专注于主题生成模型是fMRI和簇的动态因果模型(DCM)的情况,并根据有效的大脑连通性定义了。虽然一种有吸引力的方法是检测异质种群中可解释的机械解释亚组,但反转这种分层模型代表了一个特别具有挑战性的案例,因为DCM通常以其参数之间的高后相关性为特征。在这种情况下,标准的MCMC方案表现出较差的性能和非常缓慢的收敛性。在本文中,我们研究了层次聚类的特性,这导致了观察到的标准MCMC方案的失败,并提出了一种旨在改善收敛但保留计算复杂性的解决方案。具体而言,我们引入了一类建议分布,旨在捕获聚类参数和主题生成模型之间的相互依赖性,并有助于减少MCMC方案的随机行走行为。至关重要的是,这些提案分布仅引入一个单一的超参数,需要调整以实现良好的性能。为了进行验证,我们将提出的解决方案应用于合成和现实世界数据集,并将其与计算复杂性和性能相比,将其与最先进的蒙特卡洛(Hamiltonian Monte Carlo)(HMC)进行比较。我们的结果表明,对于此处考虑的特定应用域,我们提出的解决方案显示出与HMC相比的良好收敛性能和出色的运行时。
In this paper, we address technical difficulties that arise when applying Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) to hierarchical models designed to perform clustering in the space of latent parameters of subject-wise generative models. Specifically, we focus on the case where the subject-wise generative model is a dynamic causal model (DCM) for fMRI and clusters are defined in terms of effective brain connectivity. While an attractive approach for detecting mechanistically interpretable subgroups in heterogeneous populations, inverting such a hierarchical model represents a particularly challenging case, since DCM is often characterized by high posterior correlations between its parameters. In this context, standard MCMC schemes exhibit poor performance and extremely slow convergence. In this paper, we investigate the properties of hierarchical clustering which lead to the observed failure of standard MCMC schemes and propose a solution designed to improve convergence but preserve computational complexity. Specifically, we introduce a class of proposal distributions which aims to capture the interdependencies between the parameters of the clustering and subject-wise generative models and helps to reduce random walk behaviour of the MCMC scheme. Critically, these proposal distributions only introduce a single hyperparameter that needs to be tuned to achieve good performance. For validation, we apply our proposed solution to synthetic and real-world datasets and also compare it, in terms of computational complexity and performance, to Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC), a state-of-the-art Monte Carlo. Our results indicate that, for the specific application domain considered here, our proposed solution shows good convergence performance and superior runtime compared to HMC.