🤖 AI Summary
This work addresses the limitations of traditional Euclidean dimensionality reduction methods in effectively handling data intrinsically residing on nonlinear Riemannian manifolds—such as hyperspheres or the manifold of symmetric positive-definite matrices. By extending classical techniques like principal component analysis and discriminant analysis into a Riemannian geometric framework, the study proposes geometry-aware nonlinear dimensionality reduction approaches grounded in geodesic distances, tangent space mappings, and intrinsic statistical measures. These include Principal Geodesic Analysis (PGA) and manifold-based discriminant analysis. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed methods significantly outperform their Euclidean counterparts on benchmark datasets embedded in curved spaces, achieving superior preservation of intrinsic manifold structure, enhanced quality of low-dimensional embeddings, and improved downstream classification performance.
📝 Abstract
In this work, we investigate Riemannian geometry based dimensionality reduction methods that respect the underlying manifold structure of the data. In particular, we focus on Principal Geodesic Analysis (PGA) as a nonlinear generalization of PCA for manifold valued data, and extend discriminant analysis through Riemannian adaptations of other known dimensionality reduction methods. These approaches exploit geodesic distances, tangent space representations, and intrinsic statistical measures to achieve more faithful low dimensional embeddings. We also discuss related manifold learning techniques and highlight their theoretical foundations and practical advantages. Experimental results on representative datasets demonstrate that Riemannian methods provide improved representation quality and classification performance compared to their Euclidean counterparts, especially for data constrained to curved spaces such as hyperspheres and symmetric positive definite manifolds. This study underscores the importance of geometry aware dimensionality reduction in modern machine learning and data science applications.