Local coordinates alignment with global preservation for dimensionality reduction

Dimensionality reduction is vital in many fields, and alignment-based methods for nonlinear dimensionality reduction have become popular recently because they can map the high-dimensional data into a low-dimensional subspace with the property of local isometry. However, the relationships between patches in original high-dimensional space cannot be ensured to be fully preserved during the alignment process. In this paper, we propose a novel method for nonlinear dimensionality reduction called local coordinates alignment with global preservation. We first introduce a reasonable definition of topology-preserving landmarks (TPLs), which not only contribute to preserving the global structure of datasets and constructing a collection of overlapping linear patches, but they also ensure that the right landmark is allocated to the new test point. Then, an existing method for dimensionality reduction that has good performance in preserving the global structure is used to derive the low-dimensional coordinates of TPLs. Local coordinates of each patch are derived using tangent space of the manifold at the corresponding landmark, and then these local coordinates are aligned into a global coordinate space with the set of landmarks in low-dimensional space as reference points. The proposed alignment method, called landmarks-based alignment, can produce a closed-form solution without any constraints, while most previous alignment-based methods impose the unit covariance constraint, which will result in the deficiency of global metrics and undesired rescaling of the manifold. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.