Data similarity is a key concept in many data-driven applications. Many algorithms are sensitive to similarity measures. To tackle this fundamental problem, automatically learning of similarity information from data via self-expression has been developed and successfully applied in various models, such as low-rank representation, sparse subspace learning, semi-supervised learning. However, it just tries to reconstruct the original data and some valuable information, e.g., the manifold structure, is largely ignored. In this paper, we argue that it is beneficial to preserve the overall relations when we extract similarity information. Specifically, we propose a novel similarity learning framework by minimizing the reconstruction error of kernel matrices, rather than the reconstruction error of original data adopted by existing work. Taking the clustering task as an example to evaluate our method, we observe considerable improvements compared to other state-of-the-art methods. More importantly, our proposed framework is very general and provides a novel and fundamental building block for many other similarity-based tasks. Besides, our proposed kernel preserving opens up a large number of possibilities to embed high-dimensional data into low-dimensional space.
The so-called self-expression is to approximate each data point as a linear combination of other data points, i.e., @math . The rationale here is that if @math and @math are similar, weight @math should be big. Therefore, @math also behaves like the similarity matrix. This shares the similar spirit as LLE, except that we do not predetermine the neighborhood. Its corresponding learning problem is: where @math is a regularizer of @math . Two commonly used assumptions about @math are low-rank and sparse. Hence, in many domains, we also call @math as the low-dimensional representation of @math . Through this procedure, the individual pairwise similarity information hidden in the data is explored @cite_1 and the most informative neighbors'' for each data point are automatically chosen.
@cite_1
2053186076 2950981509 2964292545 2057175746
Many areas of science depend on exploratory data analysis and visualization. The need to analyze large amounts of multivariate data raises the fundamental problem of dimensionality reduction: how to discover compact representations of high-dimensional data. Here, we introduce locally linear embedding (LLE), an unsupervised learning algorithm that computes low-dimensional, neighborhood-preserving embeddings of high-dimensional inputs. Unlike clustering methods for local dimensionality reduction, LLE maps its inputs into a single global coordinate system of lower dimensionality, and its optimizations do not involve local minima. By exploiting the local symmetries of linear reconstructions, LLE is able to learn the global structure of nonlinear manifolds, such as those generated by images of faces or documents of text. How do we judge similarity? Our mental representations of the world are formed by processing large numbers of sensory in Let @math be a tree space (or tree network) represented by a weighted tree with @math vertices, and @math be a set of @math stochastic points in @math , each of which has a fixed location with an independent existence probability. We investigate two fundamental problems under such a stochastic setting, the closest-pair problem and the nearest-neighbor search. For the former, we study the computation of the @math -threshold probability and the expectation of the closest-pair distance of a realization of @math . We propose the first algorithm to compute the @math -threshold probability in @math time for any given threshold @math , which immediately results in an @math -time algorithm for computing the expected closest-pair distance. Based on this, we further show that one can compute a @math -approximation for the expected closest-pair distance in @math time, by arguing that the expected closest-pair distance can be approximated via @math threshold probability queries. For the latter, we study the @math most-likely nearest-neighbor search ( @math -LNN) via a notion called @math most-likely Voronoi Diagram ( @math -LVD). We show that the size of the @math -LVD @math of @math on @math is bounded by @math if the existence probabilities of the points in @math are constant-far from 0. Furthermore, we establish an @math average-case upper bound for the size of @math , by regarding the existence probabilities as i.i.d. random variables drawn from some fixed distribution. Our results imply the existence of an LVD data structure which answers @math -LNN queries in @math time using average-case @math space, and worst-case @math space if the existence probabilities are constant-far from 0. Finally, we also give an @math -time algorithm to construct the LVD data structure. We consider the problem of clustering a graph @math into two communities by observing a subset of the vertex correlations. Specifically, we consider the inverse problem with observed variables @math , where @math is the incidence matrix of a graph @math , @math is the vector of unknown vertex variables (with a uniform prior), and @math is a noise vector with Bernoulli @math i.i.d. entries. All variables and operations are Boolean. This model is motivated by coding, synchronization, and community detection problems. In particular, it corresponds to a stochastic block model or a correlation clustering problem with two communities and censored edges. Without noise, exact recovery (up to global flip) of @math is possible if and only the graph @math is connected, with a sharp threshold at the edge probability @math for Erdős-Renyi random graphs. The first goal of this paper is to determine how the edge probability @math needs to scale to allow exact recovery in the presence of noise. Defining the degree rate of the graph by @math , it is shown that exact recovery is possible if and only if @math . In other words, @math is the information theoretic threshold for exact recovery at low-SNR. In addition, an efficient recovery algorithm based on semidefinite programming is proposed and shown to succeed in the threshold regime up to twice the optimal rate. For a deterministic graph @math , defining the degree rate as @math , where @math is the minimum degree of the graph, it is shown that the proposed method achieves the rate @math , where @math is the spectral gap of the graph @math . We present a novel approach to measuring similarity between shapes and exploit it for object recognition. In our framework, the measurement of similarity is preceded by: (1) solving for correspondences between points on the two shapes; (2) using the correspondences to estimate an aligning transform. In order to solve the correspondence problem, we attach a descriptor, the shape context, to each point. The shape context at a reference point captures the distribution of the remaining points relative to it, thus offering a globally discriminative characterization. Corresponding points on two similar shapes will have similar shape contexts, enabling us to solve for correspondences as an optimal assignment problem. Given the point correspondences, we estimate the transformation that best aligns the two shapes; regularized thin-plate splines provide a flexible class of transformation maps for this purpose. The dissimilarity between the two shapes is computed as a sum of matching errors between corresponding points, together with a term measuring the magnitude of the aligning transform. We treat recognition in a nearest-neighbor classification framework as the problem of finding the stored prototype shape that is maximally similar to that in the image. Results are presented for silhouettes, trademarks, handwritten digits, and the COIL data set.