Experimental evaluation of latent variable models for dimensionality reduction

We use electropalatographic (EPG) data as a test bed for dimensionality reduction methods based in latent variable modelling, in which an underlying lower dimension representation is inferred directly from the data. Several models (and mixtures of them) are investigated, including factor analysis and the generative topographic mapping. Experiments indicate that nonlinear latent variable modelling reveals a low-dimensional structure in the data inaccessible to the investigated linear models