Nonlinear Dimensionality Reduction [Paperback]

This book describes established and advanced methods for reducing the dimensionality of numerical databases. Each description starts from intuitive ideas, develops the necessary mathematical details, and ends by outlining the algorithmic implementation. The text provides a lucid summary of facts and concepts relating to well-known methods as well as recent developments in nonlinear dimensionality reduction. Methods are all described from a unifying point of view, which helps to highlight their respective strengths and shortcomings. The presentation will appeal to statisticians, computer scientists and data analysts, and other practitioners having a basic background in statistics or computational learning.

This book reviews well-known methods for reducing the dimensionality of numerical databases as well as recent developments in nonlinear dimensionality reduction. All are described from a unifying point of view, which highlights their respective strengths and shortcomings.

Methods of dimensionality reduction provide a way to understand and visualize the structure of complex data sets. Traditional methods like principal component analysis and classical metric multidimensional scaling suffer from being based on linear models. Until recently, very few methods were able to reduce the data dimensionality in a nonlinear way. However, since the late nineties, many new methods have been developed and nonlinear dimensionality reduction, also called manifold learning, has become a hot topic. New advances that account for this rapid growth are, e.g. the use of graphs to represent the manifold topology, and the use of new metrics like the geodesic distance. In addition, new optimization schemes, based on kernel techniques and spectral decomposition, have lead to spectral embedding, which encompasses many of the recently developed methods.

This book describes existing and advanced methods to reduce the dimensionalitlc7