Uses For NLDR
Consider a dataset represented as a matrix (or a database table), such that each row represents a set of attributes (or features or dimensions) that describe a particular instance of something. If the number of attributes is large, then the space of unique possible rows is exponentially large. Thus, the larger the dimensionality, the more difficult it becomes to sample the space. This causes many problems. Algorithms that operate on high-dimensional data tend to have a very high time complexity. Many machine learning algorithms, for example, struggle with high-dimensional data. This has become known as the curse of dimensionality. Reducing data into fewer dimensions often makes analysis algorithms more efficient, and can help machine learning algorithms make more accurate predictions.
Humans often have difficulty comprehending data in many dimensions. Thus, reducing data to a small number of dimensions is useful for visualization purposes.
The reduced-dimensional representations of data are often referred to as "intrinsic variables". This description implies that these are the values from which the data was produced. For example, consider a dataset that contains images of a letter 'A', which has been scaled and rotated by varying amounts. Each image has 32x32 pixels. Each image can be represented as a vector of 1024 pixel values. Each row is a sample on a two-dimensional manifold in 1024-dimensional space (a Hamming space). The intrinsic dimensionality is two, because two variables (rotation and scale) were varied in order to produce the data. Information about the shape or look of a letter 'A' is not part of the intrinsic variables because it is the same in every instance. Nonlinear dimensionality reduction will discard the correlated information (the letter 'A') and recover only the varying information (rotation and scale). The image to the left shows sample images from this dataset (to save space, not all input images are shown), and a plot of the two-dimensional points that results from using a NLDR algorithm (in this case, Manifold Sculpting was used) to reduce the data into just two dimensions.
By comparison, if PCA (a linear dimensionality reduction algorithm) is used to reduce this same dataset into two dimensions, the resulting values are not so well organized. This demonstrates that the high-dimensional vectors (each representing a letter 'A') that sample this manifold vary in a non-linear manner.
It should be apparent, therefore, that NLDR has several applications in the field of computer-vision. For example, consider a robot that uses a camera to navigate in a closed static environment. The images obtained by that camera can be considered to be samples on a manifold in high-dimensional space, and the intrinsic variables of that manifold will represent the robot's position and orientation. This utility is not limited to robots. Dynamical systems, a more general class of systems, which includes robots, are defined in terms of a manifold. Active research in NLDR seeks to unfold the observation manifolds associated dynamical systems to develop techniques for modeling such systems and enable them to operate autonomously.
Read more about this topic: Nonlinear Dimensionality Reduction