Accelerated learning of Generalized Sammon Mappings

The Sammon Mapping (SM) has established itself as a valuable tool in dimensionality reduction, manifold learning, exploratory data analysis and, particularly, in data visualization. The SM is capable of projecting high-dimensional data into a low-dimensional space, so that they can be visualized and interpreted. This is accomplished by representing inter-sample dissimilarities in the original space by Euclidean inter-sample distances in the projection space. Recently, Kernel Sammon Mapping (KSM) has been shown to subsume the SM and a few other related extensions to SM. Both of the aforementioned models feature a set of linear weights that are estimated via Iterative Majorization (IM). While IM is significantly faster than other standard gradient-based methods, tackling data sets of larger than moderate sizes becomes a challenging learning task, as IM´s convergence significantly slows down with increasing data set cardinality. In this paper we derive two improved training algorithms based on Successive Over-Relaxation (SOR) and Parallel Tangents (PARTAN) acceleration, that, while still being first-order methods, exhibit faster convergence than IM. Both algorithms are relatively easy to understand, straightforward to implement and, performance-wise, are as robust as IM. We also present comparative results that illustrate their computational advantages on a set of benchmark problems.