In various data settings, it is necessary to compare observations from disparate data sources. We assume the data is in the dissimilarity representation and investigate a joint embedding method that results in a commensurate representation of disparate dissimilarities. We further assume that there are "matched" observations from different conditions which can be considered to be highly similar, for the sake of inference. The joint embedding results in the joint optimization of fidelity (preservation of within-condition dissimilarities) and commensurability (preservation of between-condition dissimilarities between matched observations). We show that the tradeoff between these two criteria can be made explicit using weighted raw stress as the objective function for multidimensional scaling. In our investigations, we use a weight parameter, @math , to control the tradeoff, and choose match detection as the inference task. Our results show weights that are optimal (with respect to the inference task) are different than equal weights for commensurability and fidelity and the proposed weighted embedding scheme provides significant improvements in statistical power.
In this paper, we propose a novel manifold alignment method by learning the underlying common manifold with supervision of corresponding data pairs from different observation sets. Different from the previous algorithms of semi-supervised manifold alignment, our method learns the explicit corresponding projections from each original observation space to the common embedding space everywhere. Benefiting from this property, our method could process new test data directly rather than re-alignment. Furthermore, our approach doesn’t have any assumption on the data structures, thus it could handle more complex cases and get better results compared with previous work. In the proposed algorithm, manifold alignment is formulated as a minimization problem with proper constraints, which could be solved in an analytical manner with closed-form solution. Experimental results on pose manifold alignment of different objects and faces demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. 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