Abstract One of the central problems in machine learning and pattern recognition is to develop appropriate representations for complex data. We consider the problem of constructing a representation for data lying on a low dimensional manifold embedded in a high dimensional space. Drawing on the correspondence between the graph Laplacian, the Laplace Beltrami operator on the manifold, and the connections to the heat equation, we propose a geometrically motivated algorithm for representing the high dimensional data. The algorithm provides a computationally efficient approach to non-linear dimensionality reduction that has locality preserving properties and a natural connection to clustering. Some potential applications and illustrative examples are discussed. 1 Introduction In many areas of artificial intelligence, information retrieval and data mining, one is often confronted with intrinsically low dimensional data lying in a very high dimensional space. Consider, for example, gray scale images of an object taken under fixed lighting conditions with a moving camera. Each such image would typically be represented by a brightness value at each pixel. If there were n 2

Drawing on the correspondence between the graph Laplacian, the Laplace-Beltrami operator on a manifold, and the connections to the heat equation, we propose a geometrically motivated algorithm for constructing a representation for data sampled from a low dimensional manifold embedded in a higher dimensional space. The algorithm provides a computationally efficient approach to nonlinear dimensionality reduction that has locality preserving properties and a natural connection to clustering. Several applications are considered.

We review the literature on semi-supervised learning, which is an area in machine learning and more generally, artificial intelligence. There has been a whole spectrum of interesting ideas on how to learn from both labeled and unlabeled data, i.e. semi-supervised learning. This document is a chapter excerpt from the author’s doctoral thesis (Zhu, 2005). However the author plans to update the online version frequently to incorporate the latest development in the field. Please obtain the latest version at http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~jerryzhu/pub/ssl_survey.pdf

Many application domains suffer from not having enough labeled training data for learning. However, large amounts of unlabeled examples can often be gathered cheaply. As a result, there has been a great deal of work in recent years on how unlabeled data can be used to aid classification. We consider an algorithm based on finding minimum cuts in graphs, that uses pairwise relationships among the examples in order to learn from both labeled and unlabeled data. Our algorithm

We propose a family of learning algorithms based on a new form of regularization that allows us to exploit the geometry of the marginal distribution. We focus on a semi-supervised framework that incorporates labeled and unlabeled data in a general-purpose learner. Some transductive graph learning algorithms and standard methods including Support Vector Machines and Regularized Least Squares can be obtained as special cases. We utilize properties of Reproducing Kernel Hilbert spaces to prove new Representer theorems that provide theoretical basis for the algorithms. As a result (in contrast to purely graph-based approaches) we obtain a natural out-of-sample extension to novel examples and so are able to handle both transductive and truly semi-supervised settings. We present experimental evidence suggesting that our semi-supervised algorithms are able to use unlabeled data effectively. Finally we have a brief discussion of unsupervised and fully supervised learning within our general framework. 1.

The problem of dimensionality reduction arises in many fields of information processing, including machine learning, data compression, scientific visualization, pattern recognition, and neural computation.

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Many problems in information processing involve some form of dimensionality reduction. In this paper, we introduce Locality Preserving Projections (LPP). These are linear projective maps that arise by solving a variational problem that optimally preserves the neighborhood structure of the data set. LPP should be seen as an alternative to Principal Component Analysis (PCA) -- a classical linear technique that projects the data along the directions of maximal variance. When the high dimensional data lies on a low dimensional manifold embedded in the ambient space, the Locality Preserving Projections are obtained by finding the optimal linear approximations to the eigenfunctions of the Laplace Beltrami operator on the manifold. As a result, LPP shares many of the data representation properties of nonlinear techniques such as Laplacian Eigenmaps or Locally Linear Embedding. Yet LPP is linear and more crucially is defined everywhere in ambient space rather than just on the training data points. This is borne out by illustrative examples on some high dimensional data sets.

The doubling constant of a metric space (X; d) is thesmallest value * such that every ball in X can be covered by * balls of half the radius. The doubling dimension of X isthen defined as dim(X) = log2 *. A metric (or sequence ofmetrics) is called doubling precisely when its doubling dimension is bounded. This is a robust class of metric spaceswhich contains many families of metrics that occur in applied settings.We give tight bounds for embedding doubling metrics into (low-dimensional) normed spaces. We consider bothgeneral doubling metrics, as well as more restricted families such as those arising from trees, from graphs excludinga fixed minor, and from snowflaked metrics. Our techniques include decomposition theorems for doubling metrics, andan analysis of a fractal in the plane due to Laakso [21]. Finally, we discuss some applications and point out a centralopen question regarding dimensionality reduction in L2.

this paper we use m i ( j ) N ( j ; i , s ), with the scale parameter s specifying the expected size of a neighborhood on the manifold in sample space. A reasonable choice is s = r/2, so that 2erf(2) > 99.5% of the density of m i ( j ) is contained in the area around y i where the manifold is expected to be locally linear. With uniform p i and i , m i ( j ) and fixed, the MAP estimates of the GMM covariances are S i = m i ( j ) (y j i )(y j i ) # + ( j i )( j i ) # +S j m i ( j ) . (3) Note that each covariance S i is dependent on all other S j . The MAP estimators for all covariances can be arranged into a set of fully constrained linear equations and solved exactly for their mutually optimal values. This key step brings nonlocal information about the manifold's shape into the local description of each neighborhood, ensuring that adjoining neighborhoods have similar covariances and small angles between their respective subspaces. Even if a local subset of data points are dense in a direction perpendicular to the manifold, the prior encourages the local chart to orient parallel to the manifold as part of a globally optimal solution, protecting against a pathology noted in [8]. Equation (3) is easily adapted to give a reduced number of charts and/or charts centered on local centroids. 4 Connecting the charts We now build a connection for set of charts specified as an arbitrary nondegenerate GMM. A GMM gives a soft partitioning of the dataset into neighborhoods of mean k and covariance S k . The optimal variance-preserving low-dimensional coordinate system for each neighborhood derives from its weighted principal component analysis, which is exactly specified by the eigenvectors of its covariance matrix: Eigendecompose V k L k V # k S k with...