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arXiv · 0809.0490

Principal Graphs and Manifolds

A. N. Gorban·A. Y. Zinovyev
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Abstract

In many physical, statistical, biological and other investigations it is desirable to approximate a system of points by objects of lower dimension and/or complexity. For this purpose, Karl Pearson invented principal component analysis in 1901 and found 'lines and planes of closest fit to system of points'. The famous k-means algorithm solves the approximation problem too, but by finite sets instead of lines and planes. This chapter gives a brief practical introduction into the methods of construction of general principal objects, i.e. objects embedded in the 'middle' of the multidimensional data set. As a basis, the unifying framework of mean squared distance approximation of finite datasets is selected. Principal graphs and manifolds are constructed as generalisations of principal components and k-means principal points. For this purpose, the family of expectation/maximisation algorithms with nearest generalisations is presented. Construction of principal graphs with controlled complexity is based on the graph grammar approach.

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A. N. Gorban, A. Y. Zinovyev. 2011-05-09. Principal Graphs and Manifolds. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-60566-766-9

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