Diffusion Transport Alignment

Andrés F. Duque, Guy Wolf, Kevin R. Moon

Abstract: The integration of multimodal data presents a challenge in cases where the study of a given phenomena by different instruments or conditions generates distinct but related domains. Many existing data integration methods assume a known one-to-one correspondence between domains of the entire dataset, which may be unrealistic. Furthermore, existing manifold alignment methods are not suited for cases where the data contains domain-specific regions, i.e., there is not a counterpart for a certain portion of the data in the other domain. We propose Diffusion Transport Alignment (DTA), a semi-supervised manifold alignment method that exploits prior knowledge of between only a few points to align the domains. After building a diffusion process, DTA finds a transportation plan between data measured from two heterogeneous domains with different feature spaces, which by assumption, share a similar geometrical structure coming from the same underlying data generating process. DTA can also compute a partial alignment in a data-driven fashion, resulting in accurate alignments when some data are measured in only one domain. We empirically demonstrate that DTA outperforms other methods in aligning multiview data in this semi-supervised setting. We also show that the alignment obtained by DTA can improve the performance of machine learning tasks, such as domain adaptation, inter-domain feature mapping, and exploratory data analysis, while outperforming competing methods.