Title: Multi-Integration of Labels across Categories for Component Identification (MILCCI)
Primary area: applications to neuroscience & cognitive science
Keywords: multi-trial data, multi-label analysis, component identification, matrix factorization, tensor factorization, dictionary learning, data-driven models, interpretability, neural ensembles

Abstract: Many fields collect large-scale temporal data through repeated measurements (`trials’), where each trial is labeled with a set of metadata experimental variables. These metadata often include labels spanning several categories. For example, a trial in a neuroscience study is linked to a value from category (a): task difficulty, and category (b): animal choice. A critical challenge in time-series analysis is thus to understand how these labels are encoded within the multi-trial observations, and disentangle the distinct effect of each label entry across categories. Here, we present MILCCI, a novel data-driven method that i) identifies the interpretable components underlying the data, ii) captures cross-trial variability, and iii) integrates label information to understand each category's representation within the data.  MILCCI extends a sparse per-trial decomposition that leverages label similarities within each category to enable subtle, label-driven cross-trial adjustments in component compositions and to distinguish the contribution of each category.  MILCCI also learns each component’s corresponding temporal trace, which evolves over time within each trial and varies flexibly across trials. We demonstrate MILCCI’s performance through both synthetic and real-world examples, including voting patterns, online page view trends, and neuronal recordings.

TL;DR: We present a novel data-driven method that identifies core components in multi-trial, multi-label temporal data while disentangling how each label dimension is encoded within the observed dynamics.