Papers › Discovering Structure in High-Dimensional Data Through Correlation Explanation

Discovering Structure in High-Dimensional Data Through Correlation Explanation

4 Jun 2014NeurIPS 2014 12arXiv:1406.1222archive 2025-07-28

Greg Ver Steeg, Aram Galstyan

We introduce a method to learn a hierarchy of successively more abstract representations of complex data based on optimizing an information-theoretic objective. Intuitively, the optimization searches for a set of latent factors that best explain the correlations in the data as measured by multivariate mutual information. The method is unsupervised, requires no model assumptions, and scales linearly with the number of variables which makes it an attractive approach for very high dimensional systems. We demonstrate that Correlation Explanation (CorEx) automatically discovers meaningful structure for data from diverse sources including personality tests, DNA, and human language.

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