SiBBlInGS: Similarity-driven Building-Block Inference using Graphs across States

Time series data across scientific domains are often collected under distinct states (e.g., tasks), wherein latent processes (e.g., biological factors) create complex inter- and intra-state variability. A key approach to capture this complexity is to uncover fundamental interpretable units within the data, i.e., Building Blocks (BBs), that modulate their activity and adjust their structure across observations. Existing methods for identifying BBs in multi-way data often overlook inter- vs. intra-state variability, produce uninterpretable components, or do not align with some real-world data properties including missing samples and sessions of different durations. Here, we present a framework for Similarity-driven Building Block Inference using Graphs across States (SiBBlInGS). SiBBlInGS offers a graph-based dictionary learning approach for discovering sparse BBs along with their temporal traces, based on co-activity patterns and inter- vs. intra-state relationships. Moreover, SiBBlInGS captures per-trial temporal variability and controlled cross-state structural BB adaptations, identifies state-specific vs. state-invariant components, and is robust to noise, missing samples, and variability in the number and duration of observed sessions across states. We demonstrate SiBBlINGS ability to reveal insights into complex phenomena through several synthetic and real-world examples, including web search and neural data.