Manifold-Based Learning and Synthesis

This paper proposes a new approach to analyze high-dimensional data set using low-dimensional manifold. This manifold-based approach provides a unified formulation for both learning from and synthesis back to the input space. The manifold learning method desires to solve two problems in many existing algorithms. The first problem is the local manifold distortion caused by the cost averaging of the global cost optimization during the manifold learning. The second problem results from the unit variance constraint generally used in those spectral embedding methods where global metric information is lost. For the out-of-sample data points, the proposed approach gives simple solutions to transverse between the input space and the feature space. In addition, this method can be used to estimate the underlying dimension and is robust to the number of neighbors. Experiments on both low-dimensional data and real image data are performed to illustrate the theory.