Nonlinear Supervised Locality Preserving Projections for Visual Pattern Discrimination

Learning representations that disentangle hidden explanatory factors in data has proven beneficial for effective pattern classification. Slow feature analysis (SFA) is a nonlinear dimensionality reduction technique that provides a useful representation for classification if the training data is sequential and transitions between classes are rare. The pattern discrimination ability of SFA has been attributed to the equivalence of linear SFA and linear discriminant analysis (LDA) under certain conditions. LDA, however, is often outperformed by locality preserving projections (LPP) when the data lies on or near a low-dimensional manifold. Here, we take a unified manifold learning perspective on LPP, LDA and SFA. We suggest that the discrimination ability of SFA is better explained by its relation to LPP than to LDA, and give an example of a situation where linear SFA outperforms LDA. We then propose a novel supervised manifold learning architecture that combines hierarchical nonlinear expansions, as commonly used for SFA, with supervised LPP. It learns a nonlinear parametric data representation that explicitly takes both the class labels and the manifold structure of the data into account. As an experimental validation, we show that this approach outperforms previously proposed models on the NORB object recognition dataset.