A Preprocessing Manifold Learning Strategy Based on t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding

In machine learning and data analysis, dimensionality reduction and high-dimensional data visualization can be accomplished by manifold learning using a t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE) algorithm. We significantly improve this manifold learning scheme by introducing a preprocessing strategy for the t-SNE algorithm. In our preprocessing, we exploit Laplacian eigenmaps to reduce the high-dimensional data first, which can aggregate each data cluster and reduce the Kullback–Leibler divergence (KLD) remarkably. Moreover, the k-nearest-neighbor (KNN) algorithm is also involved in our preprocessing to enhance the visualization performance and reduce the computation and space complexity. We compare the performance of our strategy with that of the standard t-SNE on the MNIST dataset. The experiment results show that our strategy exhibits a stronger ability to separate different clusters as well as keep data of the same kind much closer to each other. Moreover, the KLD can be reduced by about [Formula: see text] at the cost of increasing the complexity in terms of runtime by only 1–2%.