Multi-manifold discriminant local spline embedding

Manifold learning reveals the intrinsic low-dimensional manifold structure of high-dimensional data and has achieved great success in a wide spectrum of applications. However, traditional manifold learning methods assume that all the data lie on a common manifold, hence fail to capture the complicated geometry structure of the real-world data lying on multiple manifolds. This paper proposes a novel Multi-manifold Discriminant Local Spline Embedding (MDLSE) algorithm for high-dimensional classification, which considers a more realistic scenario where data of the same class lies on the same manifold. On the basis of this assumption, MDLSE seeks to reconstruct multiple manifolds for different classes of data in the embedding and separate them as apart as possible. In order to preserve the geometry structure of all the manifolds, MDLSE employs thin plate splines to align the local patches within each manifold compatibly in the global embedding. Meanwhile, to separate the different manifolds, MDLSE utilizes discriminative information to ensure the neighboring data from different manifolds to be mapped far from each other. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of MDLSE over the other representative manifold learning algorithms. The advantage of MDLSE is often more obvious on smaller size of training data and in lower embedding dimensions.