Supervised maximum variance unfolding

Maximum Variance Unfolding (MVU) is among the first methods in nonlinear dimensionality reduction for data visualization and classification. It aims to preserve local data structure and in the meantime push the variance among data as big as possible. However, MVU in general remains a computationally challenging problem and this may explain why it is less popular than other leading methods such as Isomap and t-SNE. In this paper, based on a key observation that the structure-preserving term in MVU is actually the squared stress in Multi-Dimensional Scaling (MDS), we replace the term with the stress function from MDS, resulting in a model that is usable. The property of the usability guarantees the “crowding phenomenon” will not happen in the dimension reduced results. The new model also allows us to combine label information and hence we call it the supervised MVU (SMVU). We then develop a fast algorithm that is based on Euclidean distance matrix optimization. By making use of the majorization-mininmization technique, the algorithm at each iteration solves a number of one-dimensional optimization problems, each having a closed-form solution. This strategy significantly speeds up the computation. We demonstrate the advantage of SMVU on some standard data sets against a few leading algorithms including Isomap and t-SNE.