Section: New Results

Model-Based Co-clustering for Ordinal Data of different dimensions

Participant : Christophe Biernacki.

This work has been motivated by a psychological survey on women affected by a breast tumor. Patients replied at different moments of their treatment to questionnaires with answers on ordinal scale. The questions relate to aspects of their life called dimensions. To assist the psychologists in analyzing the results, it is useful to emphasize a structure in the dataset. The clustering method achieves that by creating groups of individuals that are depicted by a representative of the group. From a psychological position, it is also useful to observe how questions may be grouped. This is why a clustering should be performed also on the features, which is called a co-clustering problem. However, gathering questions that are not related to the same dimension does not make sense from a psychologist stance. Therefore, the present work corresponds to perform a constrained co-clustering method aiming to prevent questions from different dimensions from getting assembled in a same column-cluster. In addition, evolution of co-clusters along time has been investigated. The method relies on a constrained Latent Block Model embedding a probability distribution for ordinal data. Parameter estimation relies on a Stochastic EM-algorithm associated to a Gibbs sampler, and the ICL-BIC criterion is used for selecting the numbers of co-clusters. The resulting work has been submitted to an international journal [42].

This is joint work with Margot Selosse and Julien Jacques, both from University of Lyon 2. Margot Selosse is a new PhD student co-supervised by Julien Jacques and Christophe Biernacki.