Section: Research Program

Distances and pattern recognition

Diversity may be understood as a set of dissimilarities between objects. The underlying mathematical construction is the notion of distance. Knowing a set of objects, on the condition that pairwise distances can be measured, it is possible to build a Euclidan image of it as a point cloud in a space of relevant dimension. Then, diversity can be associated with the shape of the point cloud. It is still true that the reference for recognizing patterns or shapes is the human eye. One objective of our project is to narrow the gap between the story that a human eye can read, and the story that an algorithm can tell. Several directions will be explored. First, it is necessary to master dimension reduction, mainly classical algebraic tools (PCA, NGS, Isomap, eigenmaps, etc ...), and collaborate with experts in efficient methods in spectral methods. Second, a neighborhood in a point cloud naturally leads to graphs describing the neighborhood networks. There is a natural link between modular structures in distance arrays and communities on graphs. Third, points defined by DNA sequences (for example) are samples of diversity. Dimension reduction may show that they live on a given manifold. This leads to geometry (differential or Riemanian geometry). Knowing some properties of the manifold can inform us about the constraints on the space where the measured individuals live. The connection between Riemannian geometry and graphs, where weighted graphs are seen as meshes embedded in a manifold, is currently an active field of reasearch [33], [32].

To resolve these objectives computationally will require investment in research directions in computational geometry (such as convex hulls of high-dimension sets of points), on circumventing the curse of dimensionality, and on linking distance geometry with convex optimization procedures through matrix completion. None of these questions is trivial: most recent work has focused on two or three dimensions, for example for image analysis or for reconstruction of protein conformation from local distances between atoms. The methodological goal is to extend these approaches to higher dimension spaces.