Random forest for dissimilarity based multi-view learning : application to radiomics

Abstract

The work of this thesis was initiated by a Radiomic learning problem. Radiomics is a medical discipline that aims at the large-scale analysis of data from traditional medical imaging to assist in the diagnosis and treatment of cancer. The main hypothesis of this discipline is that by extracting a large amount of information from the images, we can characterize the specificities of this pathology in a much better way than the human eye. To achieve this, Radiomics data are generally based on several types of images and/or several types of features (from images, clinical, genomic). This thesis approaches this problem from the perspective of Machine Learning (ML) and aims to propose a generic solution, adapted to any similar learning problem. To do this, we identify two types of ML problems behind Radiomics: (i) learning from high dimension, low sample size (HDLSS) and (ii) multiview learning. The solutions proposed in this manuscript exploit dissimilarity representations obtained using the Random Forest method. The use of dissimilarity representations makes it possible to overcome the well-known difficulties of learning high dimensional data, and to facilitate the joint analysis of the multiple descriptions, i.e. the views. The contributions of this thesis focus on the use of the dissimilarity measurement embedded in the Random Forest method for HDLSS multi-view learning. In particular, we present three main results: (i) the demonstration and analysis of the effectiveness of this measure for HDLSS multi-view learning; (ii) a new method for measuring dissimilarities from Random Forests, better adapted to this type of learning problem; and (iii) a new way to exploit the heterogeneity of views, using a dynamic combination mechanism. These results have been obtained on radiomic data but also on classical multi-view learning problems.

Date	2 Dec 2019
Original language	American English
Awarding Institution	École de technologie supérieure
Supervisor	Robert Sabourin (Supervisor) & Laurent Heutte (Co-supervisor)