{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/principal-differences-analysis-interpretable","title":"Principal Differences Analysis: Interpretable Characterization of Differences between Distributions","arxiv_id":"1510.08956","date":"2015-10-30","proceeding":"NeurIPS 2015 12","authors":["Jonas Mueller","Tommi Jaakkola"],"abstract":"We introduce principal differences analysis (PDA) for analyzing differences\nbetween high-dimensional distributions. The method operates by finding the\nprojection that maximizes the Wasserstein divergence between the resulting\nunivariate populations. Relying on the Cramer-Wold device, it requires no\nassumptions about the form of the underlying distributions, nor the nature of\ntheir inter-class differences. A sparse variant of the method is introduced to\nidentify features responsible for the differences. We provide algorithms for\nboth the original minimax formulation as well as its semidefinite relaxation.\nIn addition to deriving some convergence results, we illustrate how the\napproach may be applied to identify differences between cell populations in the\nsomatosensory cortex and hippocampus as manifested by single cell RNA-seq. Our\nbroader framework extends beyond the specific choice of Wasserstein divergence.","url_abs":"http://arxiv.org/abs/1510.08956v1","url_pdf":"http://arxiv.org/pdf/1510.08956v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"principal-differences-analysis-interpretable","repo_url":"https://github.com/shariarvg/sparda","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":null,"task_name":"Hippocampus"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}