Martin H C Law | Search PubMed

PubMed2006

Incremental nonlinear dimensionality reduction by manifold learning.

Understanding the structure of multidimensional patterns, especially in unsupervised cases, is of fundamental importance in data mining, pattern recognition, and machine learning. Several algorithms have been proposed to analyze the structure of high-dimensional data based on the notion of manifold learning. These algorithms have been used to extract the intrinsic characteristics of different types of high-dimensional data by performing nonlinear dimensionality reduction. Most of these algorithms operate in a "batch" mode and cannot be efficiently applied when data are collected sequentially. In this paper, we describe an incremental version of ISOMAP, one of the key manifold learning algorithms. Our experiments on synthetic data as well as real world images demonstrate that our modified algorithm can maintain an accurate low-dimensional representation of the data in an efficient manner.

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PubMed2004

Simultaneous feature selection and clustering using mixture models.

Clustering is a common unsupervised learning technique used to discover group structure in a set of data. While there exist many algorithms for clustering, the important issue of feature selection, that is, what attributes of the data should be used by the clustering algorithms, is rarely touched upon. Feature selection for clustering is difficult because, unlike in supervised learning, there are no class labels for the data and, thus, no obvious criteria to guide the search. Another important problem in clustering is the determination of the number of clusters, which clearly impacts and is influenced by the feature selection issue. In this paper, we propose the concept of feature saliency and introduce an expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm to estimate it, in the context of mixture-based clustering. Due to the introduction of a minimum message length model selection criterion, the saliency of irrelevant features is driven toward zero, which corresponds to performing feature selection. The criterion and algorithm are then extended to simultaneously estimate the feature saliencies and the number of clusters.

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