Orthogonal locality preserving indexing

We consider the problem of document indexing and representation. Recently, Locality Preserving Indexing (LPI) was proposed for learning a compact document subspace. Different from Latent Semantic Indexing which is optimal in the sense of global Euclidean structure, LPI is optimal in the sense of local manifold structure. However, LPI is extremely sensitive to the number of dimensions. This makes it difficult to estimate the intrinsic dimensionality, while inaccurately estimated dimensionality would drastically degrade its performance. One reason leading to this problem is that LPI is non-orthogonal. Non-orthogonality distorts the metric structure of the document space. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm called Orthogonal LPI. Orthogonal LPI iteratively computes the mutually orthogonal basis functions which respect the local geometrical structure. Moreover, our empirical study shows that OLPI can have more locality preserving power than LPI. We compare the new algorithm to LSI and LPI. Extensive experimental results show that Orthogonal LPI obtains better performance than both LSI and LPI. More crucially, it is insensitive to the number of dimensions, which makes it an efficient data preprocessing method for text clustering, classification, retrieval, etc.