In this paper we introduce a new underlying probabilistic model for principal component analysis (PCA). Our formulation interprets PCA as a particular Gaussian process prior on a mapping from a latent space to the observed data-space. We show that if the prior's covariance function constrains the mappings to be linear the model is equivalent to PCA, we then extend the model by considering less restrictive covariance functions which allow nonlinear mappings. This more general Gaussian process latent variable model (GPLVM) is then evaluated as an approach to the visualisation of high dimensional data for three different data-sets. Additionally our nonlinear algorithm can be further kernelised leading to'twin kernel PCA' in which a mapping between feature spaces occurs.

We consider the general problem of learning from labeled and unlabeled data, which is often called semi-supervised learning or transductive inference. A principled approach to semi-supervised learning is to design a classifying function which is sufficiently smooth with respect to the intrinsic structure collectively revealed by known labeled and unlabeled points. We present a simple algorithm to obtain such a smooth solution. Our method yields encouraging experimental results on a number of classification problems and demonstrates effective use of unlabeled data.

Spectral clustering refers to a class of techniques which rely on the eigenstructure of a similarity matrix to partition points into disjoint clusters with points in the same cluster having high similarity and points in different clusters having low similarity. In this paper, we derive a new cost function for spectral clustering based on a measure of error between a given partition and a solution of the spectral relaxation of a minimum normalized cut problem. Minimizing this cost function with respect to the partition leads to a new spectral clustering algorithm. Minimizing with respect to the similarity matrix leads to an algorithm for learning the similarity matrix. We develop a tractable approximation of our cost function that is based on the power method of computing eigenvectors.

We propose a nonlinear Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) method which works by coordinating or aligning mixtures of linear models. In the same way that CCA extends the idea of PCA, our work extends recent methods for nonlinear dimensionality reduction to the case where multiple embeddings of the same underlying low dimensional coordinates are observed, each lying on a different high dimensional manifold. We also show that a special case of our method, when applied to only a single manifold, reduces to the Laplacian Eigenmaps algorithm. As with previous alignment schemes, once the mixture models have been estimated, all of the parameters of our model can be estimated in closed form without local optima in the learning. Experimental results illustrate the viability of the approach as a nonlinear extension of CCA.

When clustering a dataset, the right number k of clusters to use is often not obvious, and choosing k automatically is a hard algorithmic problem. In this paper we present an improved algorithm for learning k while clustering. The G-means algorithm is based on a statistical test for the hypothesis that a subset of data follows a Gaussian distribution. G-means runs k-means with increasing k in a hierarchical fashion until the test accepts the hypothesis that the data assigned to each k-means center are Gaussian. Two key advantages are that the hypothesis test does not limit the covariance of the data and does not compute a full covariance matrix. Additionally, G-means only requires one intuitive parameter, the standard statistical significance level α. We present results from experiments showing that the algorithm works well, and better than a recent method based on the BIC penalty for model complexity. In these experiments, we show that the BIC is ineffective as a scoring function, since it does not penalize strongly enough the model's complexity.

We introduce a class of nonstationary covariance functions for Gaussian process (GP) regression. Nonstationary covariance functions allow the model to adapt to functions whose smoothness varies with the inputs. The class includes a nonstationary version of the Matérn stationary covariance, in which the differentiability of the regression function is controlled by a parameter, freeing one from fixing the differentiability in advance. In experiments, the nonstationary GP regression model performs well when the input space is two or three dimensions, outperforming a neural network model and Bayesian free-knot spline models, and competitive with a Bayesian neural network, but is outperformed in one dimension by a state-of-the-art Bayesian free-knot spline model.

This paper is about non-approximate acceleration of high dimensional nonparametric operations such as k nearest neighbor classifiers and the prediction phase of Support Vector Machine classifiers. We attempt to exploit the fact that even if we want exact answers to nonparametric queries, we usually do not need to explicitly find the datapoints close to the query, but merely need to ask questions about the properties about that set of datapoints. This offers a small amount of computational leeway, and we investigate how much that leeway can be exploited. For clarity, this paper concentrates on pure k-NN classification and the prediction phase of SVMs. We introduce new ball tree algorithms that on real-world datasets give accelerations of 2-fold up to 100-fold compared against highly optimized traditional ball-tree-based k-NN.

We describe a nonparametric Bayesian approach to generalizing from few labeled examples, guided by a larger set of unlabeled objects and the assumption of a latent tree-structure to the domain. The tree (or a distribution over trees) may be inferred using the unlabeled data. A prior over concepts generated by a mutation process on the inferred tree(s) allows efficient computation of the optimal Bayesian classification function from the labeled examples. We test our approach on eight real-world datasets.

In this paper, sparse representation (factorization) of a data matrix is first discussed. An overcomplete basis matrix is estimated by using the K means method.

This work presents an architecture based on perceptrons to recognize phrase structures, and an online learning algorithm to train the perceptrons together and dependently. The recognition strategy applies learning in two layers: a filtering layer, which reduces the search space by identifying plausible phrase candidates, and a ranking layer, which recursively builds the optimal phrase structure. We provide a recognition-based feedback rule which reflects to each local function its committed errors from a global point of view, and allows to train them together online as perceptrons. Experimentation on a syntactic parsing problem, the recognition of clause hierarchies, improves state-of-the-art results and evinces the advantages of our global training method over optimizing each function locally and independently.