Warped Diffusion for Latent Differentiation Inference

This paper proposes a Bayesian nonparametric diffusion model with a black-box warping function represented by a Gaussian process to infer potential diffusion structures latent in observed data, such as differentiation mechanisms of living cells and phylogenetic evolution processes of media information. In general, the task of inferring latent differentiation structures is very difficult to handle due to two interrelated settings. One is that the conversion mechanism between hidden structure and often higher dimensional observations is unknown (and is a complex mechanism). The other is that the topology of the hidden diffuse structure itself is unknown. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a BNP-based strategy as a natural way to deal with these two challenging settings simultaneously. Specifically, as an extension of the Gaussian process latent variable model, we propose a model in which the black box transformation from latent variable space to observed data space is represented by a Gaussian process, and introduce a BNP diffusion model for the latent variable space. We show its application to the visualization of the diffusion structure of media information and to the task of inferring cell differentiation structure from single-cell gene expression levels.