  The joint analysis of biomedical data in Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is
important for better clinical diagnosis and to understand the relationship
between biomarkers. However, jointly accounting for heterogeneous measures
poses important challenges related to the modeling of the variability and the
interpretability of the results. These issues are here addressed by proposing a
novel multi-channel stochastic generative model. We assume that a latent
variable generates the data observed through different channels (e.g., clinical
scores, imaging, ...) and describe an efficient way to estimate jointly the
distribution of both latent variable and data generative process. Experiments
on synthetic data show that the multi-channel formulation allows superior data
reconstruction as opposed to the single channel one. Moreover, the derived
lower bound of the model evidence represents a promising model selection
criterion. Experiments on AD data show that the model parameters can be used
for unsupervised patient stratification and for the joint interpretation of the
heterogeneous observations. Because of its general and flexible formulation, we
believe that the proposed method can find important applications as a general
data fusion technique.
