Infinite hierarchical contrastive clustering for personal digital envirotyping

TL;DR

This paper introduces an infinite hierarchical contrastive clustering method that effectively groups daily environmental images into meaningful categories, enabling personalized envirotyping and linking environments to health outcomes.

Contribution

It proposes a novel clustering approach that handles an arbitrary number of clusters and incorporates participant-specific information, advancing digital envirotyping research.

Findings

Successfully identifies distinct personal environments

Effectively groups environments into meaningful types

Links environment clusters to health outcomes

Abstract

Daily environments have profound influence on our health and behavior. Recent work has shown that digital envirotyping, where computer vision is applied to images of daily environments taken during ecological momentary assessment (EMA), can be used to identify meaningful relationships between environmental features and health outcomes of interest. To systematically study such effects on an individual level, it is helpful to group images into distinct environments encountered in an individual's daily life; these may then be analyzed, further grouped into related environments with similar features, and linked to health outcomes. Here we introduce infinite hierarchical contrastive clustering to address this challenge. Building on the established contrastive clustering framework, our method a) allows an arbitrary number of clusters without requiring the full Dirichlet Process machinery by placing a stick-breaking prior on predicted cluster probabilities; and b) encourages distinct environments to form well-defined sub-clusters within each cluster of related environments by incorporating a participant-specific prediction loss. Our experiments show that our model effectively identifies distinct personal environments and groups these environments into meaningful environment types. We then illustrate how the resulting clusters can be linked to various health outcomes, highlighting the potential of our approach to advance the envirotyping paradigm.