Browsing by Subject "Fibre bundles"

We introduce Hypoelliptic Diffusion Maps (HDM), a novel semi-supervised machine learning framework for the analysis of collections of anatomical surfaces. Triangular meshes obtained from discretizing these surfaces are high-dimensional, noisy, and unorganized, which makes it difficult to consistently extract robust geometric features for the whole collection. Traditionally, biologists put equal numbers of ``landmarks'' on each mesh, and study the ``shape space'' with this fixed number of landmarks to understand patterns of shape variation in the collection of surfaces; we propose here a correspondence-based, landmark-free approach that automates this process while maintaining morphological interpretability. Our methodology avoids explicit feature extraction and is thus related to the kernel methods, but the equivalent notion of ``kernel function'' takes value in pairwise correspondences between triangular meshes in the collection. Under the assumption that the data set is sampled from a fibre bundle, we show that the new graph Laplacian defined in the HDM framework is the discrete counterpart of a class of hypoelliptic partial differential operators.

This thesis is organized as follows: Chapter 1 is the introduction; Chapter 2 describes the correspondences between anatomical surfaces used in this research; Chapter 3 and 4 discuss the HDM framework in detail; Chapter 5 illustrates some interesting applications of this framework in geometric morphometrics.

In this thesis, we propose probabilistic models on fibre bundles for learning the generative process of data. The main tool we use is the diffusion kernel and we use it in two ways. First, we build from the diffusion kernel on a fibre bundle a projected kernel that generates robust representations of the data, and we test that it outperforms regular diffusion maps under noise. Second, this diffusion kernel gives rise to a natural covariance function when defining Gaussian processes (GP) on the fibre bundle. To demonstrate the uses of GP on a fibre bundle, we apply it to simulated data on a Mobius strip for the problem of prediction and regression. Parameter tuning can also be guided by a novel semi-group test arising from the geometric properties of diffusion kernel. For an example of real-world application, we use probabilistic models on fibre bundles to study evolutionary process on anatomical surfaces. In a separate chapter, we propose a robust algorithm (ariaDNE) for computing curvature on each individual surface. The proposed machinery, relating diffusion processes to probabilistic models on fibre bundles, provides a unified framework for ideas from a variety of different topics such as geometric operators, dimension reduction, regression and Bayesian statistics.