Structure-Aware Data Consolidation

We present a structure-aware technique to consolidate noisy data, which we use as a pre-process for standard clustering and dimensionality reduction. Our technique is related to mean shift, but instead of seeking density modes, it reveals and consolidates continuous high density structures such as curves and surface sheets in the underlying data while ignoring noise and outliers. We provide a theoretical analysis under a Gaussian noise model, and show that our approach significantly improves the performance of many non-linear dimensionality reduction and clustering algorithms in challenging scenarios.