Stratification Learning: Detecting Mixed Density and Dimensionality in High Dimensional Point Clouds

Gloria Haro, Gregory Randall, Guillermo Sapiro

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 19 (NIPS 2006)

The study of point cloud data sampled from a stratification, a collection of manifolds with possible different dimensions, is pursued in this paper. We present a technique for simultaneously soft clustering and estimating the mixed dimensionality and density of such structures. The framework is based on a maximum likelihood estimation of a Poisson mixture model. The presentation of the approach is completed with artificial and real examples demonstrating the importance of extending manifold learning to stratification learning.