Histogram-based embedding for learning on statistical manifolds

AbstractA novel binning and learning framework is presented for analyzing and applying large data sets that have no explicit knowledge of distribution parameterizations, and can only be assumed generated by the underlying probability density functions (PDFs) lying on a nonparametric statistical manifold. For models’ discretization, the uniform sampling-based data space partition is used to bin flat-distributed data sets, while the quantile-based binning is adopted for complex distributed data sets to reduce the number of under-smoothed bins in histograms on average. The compactified histogram embedding is designed so that the Fisher–Riemannian structured multinomial manifold is compatible to the intrinsic geometry of nonparametric statistical manifold, providing a computationally efficient model space for information distance calculation between binned distributions. In particular, without considering histogramming in optimal bin number, we utilize multiple random partitions on data space to embed the associated data sets onto a product multinomial manifold to integrate the complementary bin information with an information metric designed by factor geodesic distances, further alleviating the effect of over-smoothing problem. Using the equipped metric on the embedded submanifold, we improve classical manifold learning and dimension estimation algorithms in metric-adaptive versions to facilitate lower-dimensional Euclidean embedding. The effectiveness of our method is verified by visualization of data sets drawn from known manifolds, visualization and recognition on a subset of ALOI object database, and Gabor feature-based face recognition on the FERET database.