Principal Manifolds and Nonlinear Dimension Reduction via Local Tangent Space Alignment

Nonlinear manifold learning from unorganized data points is a very challenging unsupervised learning and data visualization problem with a great variety of applications. In this paper we present a new algorithm for manifold learning and nonlinear dimension reduction. Based on a set of unorganized data points sampled with noise from the manifold, we represent the local geometry of the manifold using tangent spaces learned by fitting an affine subspace in a neighborhood of each data point. Those tangent spaces are aligned to give the internal global coordinates of the data points with respect to the underlying manifold by way of a partial eigendecomposition of the neighborhood connection matrix. We present a careful error analysis of our algorithm and show that the reconstruction errors are of second-order accuracy. We illustrate our algorithm using curves and surfaces both in 2D/3D and higher dimensional Euclidean spaces, and 64-by-64 pixel face images with various pose and lighting conditions. We also address several theoretical and algorithmic issues for further research and improvements

Adaptive Affinity Matrix for Unsupervised Metric Learning

Spectral clustering is one of the most popular clustering approaches with the capability to handle some challenging clustering problems. Most spectral clustering methods provide a nonlinear map from the data manifold to a subspace. Only a little work focuses on the explicit linear map which can be viewed as the unsupervised distance metric learning. In practice, the selection of the affinity matrix exhibits a tremendous impact on the unsupervised learning. While much success of affinity learning has been achieved in recent years, some issues such as noise reduction remain to be addressed. In this paper, we propose a novel method, dubbed Adaptive Affinity Matrix (AdaAM), to learn an adaptive affinity matrix and derive a distance metric from the affinity. We assume the affinity matrix to be positive semidefinite with ability to quantify the pairwise dissimilarity. Our method is based on posing the optimization of objective function as a spectral decomposition problem. We yield the affinity from both the original data distribution and the widely-used heat kernel. The provided matrix can be regarded as the optimal representation of pairwise relationship on the manifold. Extensive experiments on a number of real-world data sets show the effectiveness and efficiency of AdaAM

High Dimensional Nonlinear Learning using Local Coordinate Coding

This paper introduces a new method for semi-supervised learning on high dimensional nonlinear manifolds, which includes a phase of unsupervised basis learning and a phase of supervised function learning. The learned bases provide a set of anchor points to form a local coordinate system, such that each data point $x$ on the manifold can be locally approximated by a linear combination of its nearby anchor points, with the linear weights offering a local-coordinate coding of $x$. We show that a high dimensional nonlinear function can be approximated by a global linear function with respect to this coding scheme, and the approximation quality is ensured by the locality of such coding. The method turns a difficult nonlinear learning problem into a simple global linear learning problem, which overcomes some drawbacks of traditional local learning methods. The work also gives a theoretical justification to the empirical success of some biologically-inspired models using sparse coding of sensory data, since a local coding scheme must be sufficiently sparse. However, sparsity does not always satisfy locality conditions, and can thus possibly lead to suboptimal results. The properties and performances of the method are empirically verified on synthetic data, handwritten digit classification, and object recognition tasks

Geometric Numerical Integration of the Assignment Flow

The assignment flow is a smooth dynamical system that evolves on an elementary statistical manifold and performs contextual data labeling on a graph. We derive and introduce the linear assignment flow that evolves nonlinearly on the manifold, but is governed by a linear ODE on the tangent space. Various numerical schemes adapted to the mathematical structure of these two models are designed and studied, for the geometric numerical integration of both flows: embedded Runge-Kutta-Munthe-Kaas schemes for the nonlinear flow, adaptive Runge-Kutta schemes and exponential integrators for the linear flow. All algorithms are parameter free, except for setting a tolerance value that specifies adaptive step size selection by monitoring the local integration error, or fixing the dimension of the Krylov subspace approximation. These algorithms provide a basis for applying the assignment flow to machine learning scenarios beyond supervised labeling, including unsupervised labeling and learning from controlled assignment flows

Missing Value Imputation With Unsupervised Backpropagation

Many data mining and data analysis techniques operate on dense matrices or complete tables of data. Real-world data sets, however, often contain unknown values. Even many classification algorithms that are designed to operate with missing values still exhibit deteriorated accuracy. One approach to handling missing values is to fill in (impute) the missing values. In this paper, we present a technique for unsupervised learning called Unsupervised Backpropagation (UBP), which trains a multi-layer perceptron to fit to the manifold sampled by a set of observed point-vectors. We evaluate UBP with the task of imputing missing values in datasets, and show that UBP is able to predict missing values with significantly lower sum-squared error than other collaborative filtering and imputation techniques. We also demonstrate with 24 datasets and 9 supervised learning algorithms that classification accuracy is usually higher when randomly-withheld values are imputed using UBP, rather than with other methods

Nonlinear Supervised Dimensionality Reduction via Smooth Regular Embeddings

The recovery of the intrinsic geometric structures of data collections is an important problem in data analysis. Supervised extensions of several manifold learning approaches have been proposed in the recent years. Meanwhile, existing methods primarily focus on the embedding of the training data, and the generalization of the embedding to initially unseen test data is rather ignored. In this work, we build on recent theoretical results on the generalization performance of supervised manifold learning algorithms. Motivated by these performance bounds, we propose a supervised manifold learning method that computes a nonlinear embedding while constructing a smooth and regular interpolation function that extends the embedding to the whole data space in order to achieve satisfactory generalization. The embedding and the interpolator are jointly learnt such that the Lipschitz regularity of the interpolator is imposed while ensuring the separation between different classes. Experimental results on several image data sets show that the proposed method outperforms traditional classifiers and the supervised dimensionality reduction algorithms in comparison in terms of classification accuracy in most settings

Explore intrinsic geometry of sleep dynamics and predict sleep stage by unsupervised learning techniques

We propose a novel unsupervised approach for sleep dynamics exploration and automatic annotation by combining modern harmonic analysis tools. Specifically, we apply diffusion-based algorithms, diffusion map (DM) and alternating diffusion (AD) algorithms, to reconstruct the intrinsic geometry of sleep dynamics by reorganizing the spectral information of an electroencephalogram (EEG) extracted from a nonlinear-type time frequency analysis tool, the synchrosqueezing transform (SST). The visualization is achieved by the nonlinear dimension reduction properties of DM and AD. Moreover, the reconstructed nonlinear geometric structure of the sleep dynamics allows us to achieve the automatic annotation purpose. The hidden Markov model is trained to predict the sleep stage. The prediction performance is validated on a publicly available benchmark database, Physionet Sleep-EDF [extended] SC* and ST*, with the leave-one-subject-out cross validation. The overall accuracy and macro F1 achieve 82:57% and 76% in Sleep-EDF SC* and 77.01% and 71:53% in Sleep-EDF ST*, which is compatible with the state-of-the-art results by supervised learning-based algorithms. The results suggest the potential of the proposed algorithm for clinical applications.Comment: 41 pages, 21 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1803.0171

Unsupervised Manifold Clustering of Topological Phononics

Classification of topological phononics is challenging due to the lack of universal topological invariants and the randomness of structure patterns. Here, we show the unsupervised manifold learning for clustering topological phononics without any priori knowledge, neither topological invariants nor supervised trainings, even when systems are imperfect or disordered. This is achieved by exploiting the real-space projection operator about finite phononic lattices to describe the correlation between oscillators. We exemplify the efficient unsupervised manifold clustering in typical phononic systems, including one-dimensional Su-Schrieffer-Heeger-type phononic chain with random couplings, amorphous phononic topological insulators, higher-order phononic topological states and non-Hermitian phononic chain with random dissipations. The results would inspire more efforts on applications of unsupervised machine learning for topological phononic devices and beyond.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure

Dimensionality Reduction on SPD Manifolds: The Emergence of Geometry-Aware Methods

Representing images and videos with Symmetric Positive Definite (SPD) matrices, and considering the Riemannian geometry of the resulting space, has been shown to yield high discriminative power in many visual recognition tasks. Unfortunately, computation on the Riemannian manifold of SPD matrices -especially of high-dimensional ones- comes at a high cost that limits the applicability of existing techniques. In this paper, we introduce algorithms able to handle high-dimensional SPD matrices by constructing a lower-dimensional SPD manifold. To this end, we propose to model the mapping from the high-dimensional SPD manifold to the low-dimensional one with an orthonormal projection. This lets us formulate dimensionality reduction as the problem of finding a projection that yields a low-dimensional manifold either with maximum discriminative power in the supervised scenario, or with maximum variance of the data in the unsupervised one. We show that learning can be expressed as an optimization problem on a Grassmann manifold and discuss fast solutions for special cases. Our evaluation on several classification tasks evidences that our approach leads to a significant accuracy gain over state-of-the-art methods.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1407.112

Exact solutions to the nonlinear dynamics of learning in deep linear neural networks

Despite the widespread practical success of deep learning methods, our theoretical understanding of the dynamics of learning in deep neural networks remains quite sparse. We attempt to bridge the gap between the theory and practice of deep learning by systematically analyzing learning dynamics for the restricted case of deep linear neural networks. Despite the linearity of their input-output map, such networks have nonlinear gradient descent dynamics on weights that change with the addition of each new hidden layer. We show that deep linear networks exhibit nonlinear learning phenomena similar to those seen in simulations of nonlinear networks, including long plateaus followed by rapid transitions to lower error solutions, and faster convergence from greedy unsupervised pretraining initial conditions than from random initial conditions. We provide an analytical description of these phenomena by finding new exact solutions to the nonlinear dynamics of deep learning. Our theoretical analysis also reveals the surprising finding that as the depth of a network approaches infinity, learning speed can nevertheless remain finite: for a special class of initial conditions on the weights, very deep networks incur only a finite, depth independent, delay in learning speed relative to shallow networks. We show that, under certain conditions on the training data, unsupervised pretraining can find this special class of initial conditions, while scaled random Gaussian initializations cannot. We further exhibit a new class of random orthogonal initial conditions on weights that, like unsupervised pre-training, enjoys depth independent learning times. We further show that these initial conditions also lead to faithful propagation of gradients even in deep nonlinear networks, as long as they operate in a special regime known as the edge of chaos.Comment: Submission to ICLR2014. Revised based on reviewer feedbac