A kernel view of the dimensionality reduction of manifolds

Abstract

We interpret several well-known algorithms for dimensionality reduction of manifolds as kernel methods. Isomap, graph Laplacian eigenmap, and locally linear embedding (LLE) all utilize local neighborhood information to construct a global embedding of the manifold. We show how all three algorithms can be described as kernel PCA on specially constructed Gram matrices, and illustrate the similarities and differences between the algorithms with representative examples.