In this dissertation, we propose and develop innovative data modeling and analysis methods for extracting meaningful and specific information about disease mechanisms from microarray gene expression data. To provide a high-level overview of gene expression data for easy and insightful understanding of data structure, we propose a novel statistical data clustering and visualization algorithm that is comprehensively effective for multiple clustering tasks and that overcomes some major limitations of existing clustering methods. The proposed clustering and visualization algorithm performs progressive, divisive hierarchical clustering and visualization, supported by hierarchical statistical modeling, supervised/unsupervised informative gene/feature selection, supervised/unsupervised data visualization, and user/prior knowledge guidance through human-data interactions, to discover cluster structure within complex, high-dimensional gene expression data. For the purpose of selecting suitable clustering algorithm(s) for gene expression data analysis, we design an objective and reliable clustering evaluation scheme to assess the performance of clustering algorithms by comparing their sample clustering outcome to phenotype categories. Using the proposed evaluation scheme, we compared the performance of our newly developed clustering algorithm with those of several benchmark clustering methods, and demonstrated the superior and stable performance of the proposed clustering algorithm. To identify the underlying active biological processes that jointly form the observed biological event, we propose a latent linear mixture model that quantitatively describes how the observed gene expressions are generated by a process of mixing the latent active biological processes. We prove a series of theorems to show the identifiability of the noise-free model. Based on relevant geometric concepts, convex analysis and optimization, gene clustering, and model stability analysis, we develop a robust blind source separation method that fits the model to the gene expression data and subsequently identify the underlying biological processes and their activity levels under different biological conditions. Based on the experimental results obtained on cancer, muscle regeneration, and muscular dystrophy gene expression data, we believe that the research work presented in this dissertation not only contributes to the engineering research areas of machine learning and pattern recognition, but also provides novel and effective solutions to potentially solve many biomedical research problems, for improving the understanding about disease mechanisms. / Ph. D.

Submitted by Maria Medeiros (maria.dilva1@ufcg.edu.br) on 2018-06-06T11:40:34Z No. of bitstreams: 1 EDUARDO SANTIAGO MOURA - TESE (PPGCC) 2016.pdf: 4888830 bytes, checksum: b0fd54b306e9a1dfeb9e68ce43716fa2 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-06-06T11:40:34Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 EDUARDO SANTIAGO MOURA - TESE (PPGCC) 2016.pdf: 4888830 bytes, checksum: b0fd54b306e9a1dfeb9e68ce43716fa2 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016 / Faces humanas são algumas das entidades mais importantes frequentemente encontradas em vídeos. Devido ao substancial volume de produção e consumo de vídeos digitais na atualidade (tanto vídeos pessoais quanto provenientes das indústrias de comunicação e entretenimento), a extração automática de informações relevantes de tais vídeos se tornou um tema ativo de pesquisa. Parte dos esforços realizados nesta área tem se concentrado no uso do reconhecimento e agrupamento facial para auxiliar o processo de anotação automática de faces em vídeos. No entanto, algoritmos de agrupamento de faces atuais ainda não são robustos às variações de aparência de uma mesma face em situações de aquisição típicas. Neste contexto, o problema abordado nesta tese é o agrupamento de faces em vídeos digitais, com a proposição de nova abordagem com desempenho superior (em termos de qualidade do agrupamento e custo computacional) em relação ao estado-da-arte, utilizando bases de vídeos de referência da literatura. Com fundamentação em uma revisão bibliográfica sistemática e em avaliações experimentais, chegou-se à proposição da abordagem, a qual é constituída por módulos de pré-processamento, detecção de faces, rastreamento, extração de características, agrupamento, análise de similaridade temporal e reagrupamento espacial. A abordagem de agrupamento de faces proposta alcançou os objetivos planejados obtendo resultados superiores (no tocante a diferentes métricas) a métodos avaliados utilizando as bases de vídeos YouTube Celebrities (KIM et al., 2008) e SAIVT-Bnews (GHAEMMAGHAMI, DEAN e SRIDHARAN, 2013). / Human faces are some of the most important entities frequently encountered in videos. As a result of the currently high volumes of digital videos production and consumption both personal and profissional videos, automatic extraction of relevant information from those videos has become an active research topic. Many efforts in this area have focused on the use of face clustering and recognition in order to aid with the process of annotating faces in videos. However, current face clustering algorithms are not robust to variations of appearance that a same face may suffer due to typical changes in acquisition scenarios. Hence, this thesis proposes a novel approach to the problem of face clustering in digital videos which achieves superior performance (in terms of clustering quality and computational cost) in comparison to the state-of-the-art, using reference video databases according to the literature. After performing a systematic literature review and experimental evaluations, the current approach has been proposed, which has the following modules: preprocessing, face detection, tracking, feature extraction, clustering, temporal similarity analysis, and spatial reclustering. The proposed approach for face clustering achieved the planned objectives obtaining better results (according to different metrics) than those presented by methods evaluated on the YouTube Celebrities videos dataset (KIM et al., 2008) and SAIVT-Bnews videos dataset (GHAEMMAGHAMI, DEAN e SRIDHARAN, 2013).