Selecting Landmark Points for Sparse Manifold Learning

Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 18 (NIPS 2005)

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Authors

Jorge Silva, Jorge Marques, João Lemos

Abstract

There has been a surge of interest in learning non-linear manifold models to approximate high-dimensional data. Both for computational complexity reasons and for generalization capability, sparsity is a desired feature in such models. This usually means dimensionality reduction, which naturally implies estimating the intrinsic dimension, but it can also mean selecting a subset of the data to use as landmarks, which is especially important because many existing algorithms have quadratic complexity in the number of observations. This paper presents an algorithm for selecting landmarks, based on LASSO regression, which is well known to favor sparse approximations because it uses regularization with an l1 norm. As an added benefit, a continuous manifold parameterization, based on the landmarks, is also found. Experimental results with synthetic and real data illustrate the algorithm.