Le clustering est le processus de partitionnement d’un ensemble de données en groupes, de sorte que les instances du même groupe sont plus semblables les unes aux autres qu’avec celles de tout autre groupe. De nombreux algorithmes de clustering ont été proposés, mais aucun d’entre eux ne s’avère fournir une partitiondes données pertinente dans toutes les situations. Le clustering par consensus vise à améliorer le processus de regroupement en combinant différentes partitions obtenues à partir de divers algorithmes afin d’obtenir une solution de consensus de meilleure qualité. Dans ce travail, une nouvelle méthode de clustering par consensus, appelée MultiCons, est proposée. Cette méthode utilise la technique d’extraction des itemsets fréquents fermés dans le but de découvrir les similitudes entre les différentes solutions de clustering dits de base. Les similitudes identifiées sont représentées sous une forme de motifs de clustering, chacun définissant un accord entre un ensemble de clusters de bases sur le regroupement d’un ensemble d’instances. En traitant ces motifs par groupes, en fonction du nombre de clusters de base qui définissent le motif, la méthode MultiCons génère une solution de consensus pour chaque groupe, générant par conséquence plusieurs consensus candidats. Ces différentes solutions sont ensuite représentées dans une structure arborescente appelée arbre de consensus, ouConsTree. Cette représentation graphique facilite la compréhension du processus de construction des multiples consensus, ainsi que les relations entre les instances et les structures d’instances dans l’espace de données / Clustering is the process of partitioning a dataset into groups, so that the instances in the same group are more similar to each other than to instances in any other group. Many clustering algorithms were proposed, but none of them proved to provide good quality partition in all situations. Consensus clustering aims to enhance the clustering process by combining different partitions obtained from different algorithms to yield a better quality consensus solution. In this work, a new consensus clustering method, called MultiCons, is proposed. It uses the frequent closed itemset mining technique in order to discover the similarities between the different base clustering solutions. The identified similarities are presented in a form of clustering patterns, that each defines the agreement between a set of base clusters in grouping a set of instances. By dividing these patterns into groups based on the number of base clusters that define the pattern, MultiCons generates a consensussolution from each group, resulting in having multiple consensus candidates. These different solutions are presented in a tree-like structure, called ConsTree, that facilitates understanding the process of building the multiple consensuses, and also the relationships between the data instances and their structuring in the data space. Five consensus functions are proposed in this work in order to build a consensus solution from the clustering patterns. Approach 1 is to just merge any intersecting clustering patterns. Approach 2 can either merge or split intersecting patterns based on a proposed measure, called intersection ratio

Many investors use different types of data methods before making a decision, regardless of whether it is long or short term. The choice of which analysis method is generally determined by risk, removal of bias and the cost. One method that has been investigated is the use of machine lerning in data analysis. The advantage of machine lernig is that the method successfully handles comples, non-linear and non-stationary problems. In this essay, it will be investigated whether unattended machine learning, which uses the K-meaning method, which is a method that has not been investigated to any great extent either in practice or in theory to create a beneficial portfolio. The data used for the k-meaning method was historical data from the Swedish stock market between 1 January 2018 and 2 November 2020. The k-meaning analysis consists of the return of all shares included within OMX30 and the average deviation, which created a cluster of 11 shares that could generate a relatively high return compared to the remaining shares. To analyze whether the generated cluster were acceptable, an analysis of the sharpe-ratio and downward risk was preformed, which showed that the portfolio had a good risk-adjusted returnbut a worse result on downward risk.

The purpose of this study was to develop an interactive tool that enables identification of different types of users of an application based on clickstream data. A complex hierarchical clustering algorithm tool called Recursive Hierarchical Clustering (RHC) was used. RHC provides a visualisation of user types as clusters, where each cluster has its own distinguishing action pattern, i.e., one or several consecutive actions made by the user in the application. A case study was conducted on the mobile application Plick, which is an application for selling and buying second hand clothes. During the course of the project, the analysis and its result was discovered to be difficult to understand by the operators of the tool. The interactive tool had to be extended to visualise the complex analysis and its result in an intuitive way. A literature study of how humans interpret information, and how to present it to operators, was conducted and led to a redesign of the tool. More information was added to each cluster to enable further understanding of the clustering results. A clustering reconfiguration option was also created where operators of the tool got the possibility to interact with the analysis. In the reconfiguration, the operator could change the input file of the cluster analysis and thus the end result. Usability tests showed that the extra added information about the clusters served as an amplification and a verification of the original results presented by RHC. In some cases the original result presented by RHC was used as a verification to user group identification made by the operator solely based on the extra added information. The usability tests showed that the complex analysis with its results could be understood and configured without considerable comprehension of the algorithm. Instead it seemed like it could be successfully used in order to identify user types with help of visual clues in the interface and default settings in the reconfiguration. The visualisation tool is shown to be successful in identifying and visualising user groups in an intuitive way.

Sleep is an important part of life as it affects the performance of one's activities during all awake hours. The study of sleep and wakefulness is therefore of great interest, particularly to the clinical and medical fields where sleep disorders are diagnosed. When studying sleep, it is common to talk about different types, or stages, of sleep. A common task in sleep research is to determine the sleep stage of the sleeping subject as a function of time. This process is known as sleep stage scoring. In this study, I seek to determine whether there is any benefit to using unsupervised feature learning in the context of electroencephalogram-based (EEG) sleep scoring. More specifically, the effect of generating and making use of new feature representations for hand-crafted features of sleep data – meta-features – is studied. For this purpose, two scoring algorithms have been implemented and compared. Both scoring algorithms involve segmentation of the EEG signal, feature extraction, feature selection and classification using a support vector machine (SVM). Unsupervised feature learning was implemented in the form of a dimensionality-reducing deep-belief network (DBN) which the feature space was processed through. Both scorers were shown to have a classification accuracy of about 76 %. The application of unsupervised feature learning did not affect the accuracy significantly. It is speculated that with a better choice of parameters for the DBN in a possible future work, the accuracy may improve significantly. / Sömnen är en viktig del av livet eftersom den påverkar ens prestation under alla vakna timmar. Forskning om sömn and vakenhet är därför av stort intresse, i synnerhet för de kliniska och medicinska områdena där sömnbesvär diagnostiseras. I forskning om sömn är det är vanligt att tala om olika typer av sömn, eller sömnstadium. En vanlig uppgift i sömnforskning är att avgöra sömnstadiet av den sovande exemplaret som en funktion av tiden. Den här processen kallas sömnmätning. I den här studien försöker jag avgöra om det finns någon fördel med att använda oövervakad inlärning av särdrag för att utföra elektroencephalogram-baserad (EEG) sömnmätning. Mer specifikt undersöker jag effekten av att generera och använda nya särdragsrepresentationer som härstammar från handgjorda särdrag av sömndata – meta-särdrag. Två sömnmätningsalgoritmer har implementerats och jämförts för det här syftet. Sömnmätningsalgoritmerna involverar segmentering av EEG-signalen, extraktion av särdragen, urval av särdrag och klassificering genom användning av en stödvektormaskin (SVM). Oövervakad inlärning av särdrag implementerades i form av ett dimensionskrympande djuptrosnätverk (DBN) som användes för att bearbetasärdragsrymden. Båda sömnmätarna visades ha en klassificeringsprecision av omkring 76 %. Användningen av oövervakad inlärning av särdrag hade ingen signifikant inverkan på precisionen. Det spekuleras att precisionen skulle kunna höjas med ett mer lämpligt val av parametrar för djuptrosnätverket.

We expand the scope of image-to-image translation to include more distinct image domains, where the image sets have analogous structures, but may not share object types between them. Semantic-Driven Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation for Distinct Image Domains (SUNIT) is built to more successfully translate images in this setting, where content from one domain is not found in the other. Our method trains an image translation model by learning encodings for semantic segmentations of images. These segmentations are translated between image domains to learn meaningful mappings between the structures in the two domains. The translated segmentations are then used as the basis for image generation. Beginning image generation with encoded segmentation information helps maintain the original structure of the image. We qualitatively and quantitatively show that SUNIT improves image translation outcomes, especially for image translation tasks where the image domains are very distinct.

[ES] El futuro de la imagen médica está ligado a la inteligencia artificial. El análisis manual de imágenes médicas es hoy en día una tarea ardua, propensa a errores y a menudo inasequible para los humanos, que ha llamado la atención de la comunidad de Aprendizaje Automático (AA). La Imagen por Resonancia Magnética (IRM) nos proporciona una rica variedad de representaciones de la morfología y el comportamiento de lesiones inaccesibles sin una intervención invasiva arriesgada. Sin embargo, explotar la potente pero a menudo latente información contenida en la IRM es una tarea muy complicada, que requiere técnicas de análisis computacional inteligente. Los tumores del sistema nervioso central son una de las enfermedades más críticas estudiadas a través de IRM. Específicamente, el glioblastoma representa un gran desafío, ya que, hasta la fecha, continua siendo un cáncer letal que carece de una terapia satisfactoria. Del conjunto de características que hacen del glioblastoma un tumor tan agresivo, un aspecto particular que ha sido ampliamente estudiado es su heterogeneidad vascular. La fuerte proliferación vascular del glioblastoma, así como su robusta angiogénesis han sido consideradas responsables de la alta letalidad de esta neoplasia. Esta tesis se centra en la investigación y desarrollo del método Hemodynamic Tissue Signature (HTS): un método de AA no supervisado para describir la heterogeneidad vascular de los glioblastomas mediante el análisis de perfusión por IRM. El método HTS se basa en el concepto de hábitat, que se define como una subregión de la lesión con un perfil de IRM que describe un comportamiento fisiológico concreto. El método HTS delinea cuatro hábitats en el glioblastoma: el hábitat HAT, como la región más perfundida del tumor con captación de contraste; el hábitat LAT, como la región del tumor con un perfil angiogénico más bajo; el hábitat IPE, como la región adyacente al tumor con índices de perfusión elevados; y el hábitat VPE, como el edema restante de la lesión con el perfil de perfusión más bajo. La investigación y desarrollo de este método ha originado una serie de contribuciones enmarcadas en esta tesis. Primero, para verificar la fiabilidad de los métodos de AA no supervisados en la extracción de patrones de IRM, se realizó una comparativa para la tarea de segmentación de gliomas de grado alto. Segundo, se propuso un algoritmo de AA no supervisado dentro de la familia de los Spatially Varying Finite Mixture Models. El algoritmo propone una densidad a priori basada en un Markov Random Field combinado con la función probabilística Non-Local Means, para codificar la idea de que píxeles vecinos tienden a pertenecer al mismo objeto. Tercero, se presenta el método HTS para describir la heterogeneidad vascular del glioblastoma. El método se ha aplicado a casos reales en una cohorte local de un solo centro y en una cohorte internacional de más de 180 pacientes de 7 centros europeos. Se llevó a cabo una evaluación exhaustiva del método para medir el potencial pronóstico de los hábitats HTS. Finalmente, la tecnología desarrollada en la tesis se ha integrado en la plataforma online ONCOhabitats (https://www.oncohabitats.upv.es). La plataforma ofrece dos servicios: 1) segmentación de tejidos de glioblastoma, y 2) evaluación de la heterogeneidad vascular del tumor mediante el método HTS. Los resultados de esta tesis han sido publicados en diez contribuciones científicas, incluyendo revistas y conferencias de alto impacto en las áreas de Informática Médica, Estadística y Probabilidad, Radiología y Medicina Nuclear y Aprendizaje Automático. También se emitió una patente industrial registrada en España, Europa y EEUU. Finalmente, las ideas originales concebidas en esta tesis dieron lugar a la creación de ONCOANALYTICS CDX, una empresa enmarcada en el modelo de negocio de los companion diagnostics de compuestos farmacéuticos. / [EN] The future of medical imaging is linked to Artificial Intelligence (AI). The manual analysis of medical images is nowadays an arduous, error-prone and often unaffordable task for humans, which has caught the attention of the Machine Learning (ML) community. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) provides us with a wide variety of rich representations of the morphology and behavior of lesions completely inaccessible without a risky invasive intervention. Nevertheless, harnessing the powerful but often latent information contained in MRI acquisitions is a very complicated task, which requires computational intelligent analysis techniques. Central nervous system tumors are one of the most critical diseases studied through MRI. Specifically, glioblastoma represents a major challenge, as it remains a lethal cancer that, to date, lacks a satisfactory therapy. Of the entire set of characteristics that make glioblastoma so aggressive, a particular aspect that has been widely studied is its vascular heterogeneity. The strong vascular proliferation of glioblastomas, as well as their robust angiogenesis and extensive microvasculature heterogeneity have been claimed responsible for the high lethality of the neoplasm. This thesis focuses on the research and development of the Hemodynamic Tissue Signature (HTS) method: an unsupervised ML approach to describe the vascular heterogeneity of glioblastomas by means of perfusion MRI analysis. The HTS builds on the concept of habitats. A habitat is defined as a sub-region of the lesion with a particular MRI profile describing a specific physiological behavior. The HTS method delineates four habitats within the glioblastoma: the HAT habitat, as the most perfused region of the enhancing tumor; the LAT habitat, as the region of the enhancing tumor with a lower angiogenic profile; the potentially IPE habitat, as the non-enhancing region adjacent to the tumor with elevated perfusion indexes; and the VPE habitat, as the remaining edema of the lesion with the lowest perfusion profile. The research and development of the HTS method has generated a number of contributions to this thesis. First, in order to verify that unsupervised learning methods are reliable to extract MRI patterns to describe the heterogeneity of a lesion, a comparison among several unsupervised learning methods was conducted for the task of high grade glioma segmentation. Second, a Bayesian unsupervised learning algorithm from the family of Spatially Varying Finite Mixture Models is proposed. The algorithm integrates a Markov Random Field prior density weighted by the probabilistic Non-Local Means function, to codify the idea that neighboring pixels tend to belong to the same semantic object. Third, the HTS method to describe the vascular heterogeneity of glioblastomas is presented. The HTS method has been applied to real cases, both in a local single-center cohort of patients, and in an international retrospective cohort of more than 180 patients from 7 European centers. A comprehensive evaluation of the method was conducted to measure the prognostic potential of the HTS habitats. Finally, the technology developed in this thesis has been integrated into an online open-access platform for its academic use. The ONCOhabitats platform is hosted at https://www.oncohabitats.upv.es, and provides two main services: 1) glioblastoma tissue segmentation, and 2) vascular heterogeneity assessment of glioblastomas by means of the HTS method. The results of this thesis have been published in ten scientific contributions, including top-ranked journals and conferences in the areas of Medical Informatics, Statistics and Probability, Radiology & Nuclear Medicine and Machine Learning. An industrial patent registered in Spain, Europe and EEUU was also issued. Finally, the original ideas conceived in this thesis led to the foundation of ONCOANALYTICS CDX, a company framed into the business model of companion diagnostics for pharmaceutical compounds. / [CA] El futur de la imatge mèdica està lligat a la intel·ligència artificial. L'anàlisi manual d'imatges mèdiques és hui dia una tasca àrdua, propensa a errors i sovint inassequible per als humans, que ha cridat l'atenció de la comunitat d'Aprenentatge Automàtic (AA). La Imatge per Ressonància Magnètica (IRM) ens proporciona una àmplia varietat de representacions de la morfologia i el comportament de lesions inaccessibles sense una intervenció invasiva arriscada. Tanmateix, explotar la potent però sovint latent informació continguda a les adquisicions de IRM esdevé una tasca molt complicada, que requereix tècniques d'anàlisi computacional intel·ligent. Els tumors del sistema nerviós central són una de les malalties més crítiques estudiades a través de IRM. Específicament, el glioblastoma representa un gran repte, ja que, fins hui, continua siguent un càncer letal que manca d'una teràpia satisfactòria. Del conjunt de característiques que fan del glioblastoma un tumor tan agressiu, un aspecte particular que ha sigut àmpliament estudiat és la seua heterogeneïtat vascular. La forta proliferació vascular dels glioblastomes, així com la seua robusta angiogènesi han sigut considerades responsables de l'alta letalitat d'aquesta neoplàsia. Aquesta tesi es centra en la recerca i desenvolupament del mètode Hemodynamic Tissue Signature (HTS): un mètode d'AA no supervisat per descriure l'heterogeneïtat vascular dels glioblastomas mitjançant l'anàlisi de perfusió per IRM. El mètode HTS es basa en el concepte d'hàbitat, que es defineix com una subregió de la lesió amb un perfil particular d'IRM, que descriu un comportament fisiològic concret. El mètode HTS delinea quatre hàbitats dins del glioblastoma: l'hàbitat HAT, com la regió més perfosa del tumor amb captació de contrast; l'hàbitat LAT, com la regió del tumor amb un perfil angiogènic més baix; l'hàbitat IPE, com la regió adjacent al tumor amb índexs de perfusió elevats, i l'hàbitat VPE, com l'edema restant de la lesió amb el perfil de perfusió més baix. La recerca i desenvolupament del mètode HTS ha originat una sèrie de contribucions emmarcades a aquesta tesi. Primer, per verificar la fiabilitat dels mètodes d'AA no supervisats en l'extracció de patrons d'IRM, es va realitzar una comparativa en la tasca de segmentació de gliomes de grau alt. Segon, s'ha proposat un algorisme d'AA no supervisat dintre de la família dels Spatially Varying Finite Mixture Models. L'algorisme proposa un densitat a priori basada en un Markov Random Field combinat amb la funció probabilística Non-Local Means, per a codificar la idea que els píxels veïns tendeixen a pertànyer al mateix objecte semàntic. Tercer, es presenta el mètode HTS per descriure l'heterogeneïtat vascular dels glioblastomas. El mètode HTS s'ha aplicat a casos reals en una cohort local d'un sol centre i en una cohort internacional de més de 180 pacients de 7 centres europeus. Es va dur a terme una avaluació exhaustiva del mètode per mesurar el potencial pronòstic dels hàbitats HTS. Finalment, la tecnologia desenvolupada en aquesta tesi s'ha integrat en una plataforma online ONCOhabitats (https://www.oncohabitats.upv.es). La plataforma ofereix dos serveis: 1) segmentació dels teixits del glioblastoma, i 2) avaluació de l'heterogeneïtat vascular dels glioblastomes mitjançant el mètode HTS. Els resultats d'aquesta tesi han sigut publicats en deu contribucions científiques, incloent revistes i conferències de primer nivell a les àrees d'Informàtica Mèdica, Estadística i Probabilitat, Radiologia i Medicina Nuclear i Aprenentatge Automàtic. També es va emetre una patent industrial registrada a Espanya, Europa i els EEUU. Finalment, les idees originals concebudes en aquesta tesi van donar lloc a la creació d'ONCOANALYTICS CDX, una empresa emmarcada en el model de negoci dels companion diagnostics de compostos farmacèutics. / En este sentido quiero agradecer a las diferentes instituciones y estructuras de financiación de investigación que han contribuido al desarrollo de esta tesis. En especial quiero agradecer a la Universitat Politècnica de València, donde he desarrollado toda mi carrera acadèmica y científica, así como al Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, al Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, a la Comisión Europea, al EIT Health Programme y a la fundación Caixa Impulse / Juan Albarracín, J. (2020). Unsupervised learning for vascular heterogeneity assessment of glioblastoma based on magnetic resonance imaging: The Hemodynamic Tissue Signature [Tesis doctoral]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/149560 / TESIS

In today's society, companies are trying to find ways to utilize all the data they have, which considers valuable information and insights to make better decisions. This includes data used to keeping track of timber that flows between forest and industry. The growth of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) has enabled the development of ML modes to automate the measurements of timber on timber trucks, based on images. However, to improve the results there is a need to be able to get information from unlabeled images in order to decide weather and lighting conditions. The objective of this study is to perform an extensive for classifying unlabeled images in the categories, daylight, darkness, and snow on the load. A comparative study between partitional clustering and competitive learning is conducted to investigate which method gives the best results in terms of different clustering performance metrics. It also examines how dimensionality reduction affects the outcome. The algorithms K-means and Kohonen Self-Organizing Map (SOM) are selected for the clustering. Each model is investigated according to the number of clusters, size of dataset, clustering time, clustering performance, and manual samples from each cluster. The results indicate a noticeable clustering performance discrepancy between the algorithms concerning the number of clusters, dataset size, and manual samples. The use of dimensionality reduction led to shorter clustering time but slightly worse clustering performance. The evaluation results further show that the clustering time of Kohonen SOM is significantly higher than that of K-means.

Neurons are sensitive to specific aspects of natural stimuli, which are according to different statistical criteria an optimal representation of the natural sensory input. Since these representations are purely sensory, it is still an open question whether they are suited to generate meaningful behavior. Here we introduce an optimization scheme that applies a statistical criterion to an agent s sensory input while taking its motor behavior into account. We first introduce a general cognitive model, and second develop an optimization scheme that increases the predictability of the sensory outcome of the agent s motor actions and apply this to a navigational paradigm.In the cognitive model, place cells divide the environment into discrete states, similar to hippocampal place cells. The agents learned the sensory outcome of its action by the state-to-state transition probabilities and the extent to which these motor actions are caused by sensory-driven reflexive behavior (obstacle avoidance). Navigational decision making integrates both learned components to derive the actions that are most likely to lead to a navigational goal. Next we introduced an optimization process that modified the state distributions to increase the predictability of the sensory outcome of the agent s actions.The cognitive model successfully performs the navigational task, and the differentiation between transitions and reflexive processing increases both behavioral accuracy, as well as behavioral adaptation to changes in the environment. Further, the optimized sensory states are similar to place fields found in behaving animals. The spatial distribution of states depends on the agent s motor capabilities as well as on the environment. We proofed the generality of predictability as a coding principle by comparing it to the existing ones. Our results suggest that the agent s motor apparatus can play a profound role in the formation of place fields and thus in higher sensory representations.

La diversité linguistique est actuellement menacée : la moitié des langues connues dans le monde pourraient disparaître d'ici la fin du siècle. Cette prise de conscience a inspiré de nombreuses initiatives dans le domaine de la linguistique documentaire au cours des deux dernières décennies, et 2019 a été proclamée Année internationale des langues autochtones par les Nations Unies, pour sensibiliser le public à cette question et encourager les initiatives de documentation et de préservation. Néanmoins, ce travail est coûteux en temps, et le nombre de linguistes de terrain, limité. Par conséquent, le domaine émergent de la documentation linguistique computationnelle (CLD) vise à favoriser le travail des linguistes à l'aide d'outils de traitement automatique. Le projet Breaking the Unwritten Language Barrier (BULB), par exemple, constitue l'un des efforts qui définissent ce nouveau domaine, et réunit des linguistes et des informaticiens. Cette thèse examine le problème particulier de la découverte de mots dans un flot non segmenté de caractères, ou de phonèmes, transcrits à partir du signal de parole dans un contexte de langues très peu dotées. Il s'agit principalement d'une procédure de segmentation, qui peut également être couplée à une procédure d'alignement lorsqu'une traduction est disponible. En utilisant deux corpus en langues bantoues correspondant à un scénario réaliste pour la linguistique documentaire, l'un en Mboshi (République du Congo) et l'autre en Myene (Gabon), nous comparons diverses méthodes monolingues et bilingues de découverte de mots sans supervision. Nous montrons ensuite que l'utilisation de connaissances linguistiques expertes au sein du formalisme des Adaptor Grammars peut grandement améliorer les résultats de la segmentation, et nous indiquons également des façons d'utiliser ce formalisme comme outil de décision pour le linguiste. Nous proposons aussi une variante tonale pour un algorithme de segmentation bayésien non-paramétrique, qui utilise un schéma de repli modifié pour capturer la structure tonale. Pour tirer parti de la supervision faible d'une traduction, nous proposons et étendons, enfin, une méthode de segmentation neuronale basée sur l'attention, et améliorons significativement la performance d'une méthode bilingue existante. / Language diversity is under considerable pressure: half of the world’s languages could disappear by the end of this century. This realization has sparked many initiatives in documentary linguistics in the past two decades, and 2019 has been proclaimed the International Year of Indigenous Languages by the United Nations, to raise public awareness of the issue and foster initiatives for language documentation and preservation. Yet documentation and preservation are time-consuming processes, and the supply of field linguists is limited. Consequently, the emerging field of computational language documentation (CLD) seeks to assist linguists in providing them with automatic processing tools. The Breaking the Unwritten Language Barrier (BULB) project, for instance, constitutes one of the efforts defining this new field, bringing together linguists and computer scientists. This thesis examines the particular problem of discovering words in an unsegmented stream of characters, or phonemes, transcribed from speech in a very-low-resource setting. This primarily involves a segmentation procedure, which can also be paired with an alignment procedure when a translation is available. Using two realistic Bantu corpora for language documentation, one in Mboshi (Republic of the Congo) and the other in Myene (Gabon), we benchmark various monolingual and bilingual unsupervised word discovery methods. We then show that using expert knowledge in the Adaptor Grammar framework can vastly improve segmentation results, and we indicate ways to use this framework as a decision tool for the linguist. We also propose a tonal variant for a strong nonparametric Bayesian segmentation algorithm, making use of a modified backoff scheme designed to capture tonal structure. To leverage the weak supervision given by a translation, we finally propose and extend an attention-based neural segmentation method, improving significantly the segmentation performance of an existing bilingual method.

Les relaxations en problème d’optimisation linéaire jouent un rôle central en inférence du maximum a posteriori (map) dans les champs aléatoires de Markov discrets. Nous étudions ici les avantages offerts par les méthodes de Newton pour résoudre efficacement le problème dual (au sens de Lagrange) d’une reformulation lisse du problème. Nous comparons ces dernières aux méthodes de premier ordre, à la fois en terme de vitesse de convergence et de robustesse au mauvais conditionnement du problème. Nous exposons donc un cadre général pour l’apprentissage non-supervisé basé sur le transport optimal et les régularisations parcimonieuses. Nous exhibons notamment une approche prometteuse pour résoudre le problème de la préimage dans l’acp à noyau. Du point de vue de l’optimisation, nous décrivons le calcul du gradient d’une version lisse de la norme p de Schatten et comment cette dernière peut être utilisée dans un schéma de majoration-minimisation. / Numerical optimization and machine learning have had a fruitful relationship, from the perspective of both theory and application. In this thesis, we present an application oriented take on some inference and learning problems. Linear programming relaxations are central to maximum a posteriori (MAP) inference in discrete Markov Random Fields (MRFs). Especially, inference in higher-order MRFs presents challenges in terms of efficiency, scalability and solution quality. In this thesis, we study the benefit of using Newton methods to efficiently optimize the Lagrangian dual of a smooth version of the problem. We investigate their ability to achieve superior convergence behavior and to better handle the ill-conditioned nature of the formulation, as compared to first order methods. We show that it is indeed possible to obtain an efficient trust region Newton method, which uses the true Hessian, for a broad range of MAP inference problems. Given the specific opportunities and challenges in the MAP inference formulation, we present details concerning (i) efficient computation of the Hessian and Hessian-vector products, (ii) a strategy to damp the Newton step that aids efficient and correct optimization, (iii) steps to improve the efficiency of the conjugate gradient method through a truncation rule and a pre-conditioner. We also demonstrate through numerical experiments how a quasi-Newton method could be a good choice for MAP inference in large graphs. MAP inference based on a smooth formulation, could greatly benefit from efficient sum-product computation, which is required for computing the gradient and the Hessian. We show a way to perform sum-product computation for trees with sparse clique potentials. This result could be readily used by other algorithms, also. We show results demonstrating the usefulness of our approach using higher-order MRFs. Then, we discuss potential research topics regarding tightening the LP relaxation and parallel algorithms for MAP inference.Unsupervised learning is an important topic in machine learning and it could potentially help high dimensional problems like inference in graphical models. We show a general framework for unsupervised learning based on optimal transport and sparse regularization. Optimal transport presents interesting challenges from an optimization point of view with its simplex constraints on the rows and columns of the transport plan. We show one way to formulate efficient optimization problems inspired by optimal transport. This could be done by imposing only one set of the simplex constraints and by imposing structure on the transport plan through sparse regularization. We show how unsupervised learning algorithms like exemplar clustering, center based clustering and kernel PCA could fit into this framework based on different forms of regularization. We especially demonstrate a promising approach to address the pre-image problem in kernel PCA. Several methods have been proposed over the years, which generally assume certain types of kernels or have too many hyper-parameters or make restrictive approximations of the underlying geometry. We present a more general method, with only one hyper-parameter to tune and with some interesting geometric properties. From an optimization point of view, we show how to compute the gradient of a smooth version of the Schatten p-norm and how it can be used within a majorization-minimization scheme. Finally, we present results from our various experiments.