Automatic choice of the number of nearest neighbors in locally linear embedding

Abstract

Locally linear embedding (LLE) is a method for nonlinear dimensionality reduction, which calculates a low dimensional embedding with the property that nearby points in the high dimensional space remain nearby and similarly co-located with respect to one another in the low dimensional space [1]. LLE algorithm needs to set up a free parameter, the number of nearest neighbors k. This parameter has a strong influence in the transformation. In this paper is proposed a cost function that quantifies the quality of the embedding results and computes an appropriate k. Quality measure is tested on artificial and real-world data sets, which allow us to visually confirm whether the embedding was correctly calculated. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.