Reducing electrophysiological (EP) signal noise is essential for diagnosis, mapping, and ablation procedures in patients with arrhythmias or conditions such as cardiomyopathies. However, traditional approaches have been suboptimal due to the varied sources of noise. We hypothesized that variational autoencoders (VAEs) can learn key components of ’clean’ electrophysiological signals by creating robust internal representations, thereby enabling automatic denoising of diverse noise in clinical recordings. We set out to apply a β -VAE model to a dataset of 5706 intra-ventricular monophasic action potential (MAP) signals, selected because their morphology is verifiable and measurable against a reference, from 42 patients with ischemic cardiomyopathy at risk for sudden death. We designed a noise library, and implemented baselines based on state-of-the-art clinical filtering techniques. The proposed β -VAE model was assessed for various noise types, including challenging non-stationary real EP noise. Comprehensive evaluation using general metrics and clinical action potential duration labels by domain experts revealed that our β -VAE outperformed current state-of-the-art filters in denoising efficacy, with key physiological information encoded in the reconstruction. We performed a sensitivity analysis that confirmed the robustness of the β -VAE model to increasing noise levels. These results demonstrate the ability of our model to denoise various sources, including those of time-varying nature. The application to well-studied MAPs verifies that clinically meaningful features were reconstructed in the EP context. This work enhances traditional signal processing approaches to ensure ’clean’ electrical signals, and may have promising applications for diagnosis, tracking therapy and prognostication in patients with EP disorders in real-world clinical environments.

The hierarchical structure inherent in many real-world datasets makes the modeling of such hierarchies a crucial objective in both unsupervised and supervised machine learning. While recent advancements have introduced deep architectures specifically designed for hierarchical clustering, we adopt a critical perspective on this line of research. Our findings reveal that these methods face significant limitations in scalability and performance when applied to realistic datasets. Given these findings, we present an alternative approach and introduce a lightweight method that builds on pre-trained non-hierarchical clustering models. Remarkably, our approach outperforms specialized deep models for hierarchical clustering, and it is broadly applicable to any pre-trained clustering model that outputs logits, without requiring any fine-tuning. To highlight the generality of our approach, we extend its application to a supervised setting, demonstrating its ability to recover meaningful hierarchies from a pre-trained ImageNet classifier. Our results establish a practical and effective alternative to existing deep hierarchical clustering methods, with significant advantages in efficiency, scalability and performance.

We propose Tree Variational Autoencoder (TreeVAE), a new generative hierarchical clustering model that learns a flexible tree-based posterior distribution over latent variables. TreeVAE hierarchically divides samples according to their intrinsic characteristics, shedding light on hidden structures in the data. It adapts its architecture to discover the optimal tree for encoding dependencies between latent variables. The proposed tree-based generative architecture enables lightweight conditional inference and improves generative performance by utilizing specialized leaf decoders. We show that TreeVAE uncovers underlying clusters in the data and finds meaningful hierarchical relations between the different groups on a variety of datasets, including real-world imaging data. We present empirically that TreeVAE provides a more competitive log-likelihood lower bound than the sequential counterparts. Finally, due to its generative nature, TreeVAE is able to generate new samples from the discovered clusters via conditional sampling.

Partitioning a set of elements into an unknown number of mutually exclusive subsets is essential in many machine learning problems. However, assigning elements, such as samples in a dataset or neurons in a network layer, to an unknown and discrete number of subsets is inherently non-differentiable, prohibiting end-to-end gradient-based optimization of parameters. We overcome this limitation by proposing a novel two-step method for inferring partitions, which allows its usage in variational inference tasks. This new approach enables reparameterized gradients with respect to the parameters of the new random partition model. Our method works by inferring the number of elements per subset and, second, by filling these subsets in a learned order. We highlight the versatility of our general-purpose approach on three different challenging experiments: variational clustering, inference of shared and independent generative factors under weak supervision, and multitask learning.