Semi-supervised learning with manifold fitted graphs

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a locality-constrained and sparsity-encouraged manifold fitting approach, aiming at capturing the locally sparse manifold structure into neighborhood graph construction by exploiting a principled optimization model. The proposed model formulates neighborhood graph construction as a sparse coding problem with the locality constraint, therefore achieving simultaneous neighbor selection and edge weight optimization. The core idea underlying our model is to perform a sparse manifold fitting task for each data point so that close-by points lying on the same local manifold are automatically chosen to connect and meanwhile the connection weights are acquired by simple geometric reconstruction. We term the novel neighborhood graph generated by our proposed optimization model M-Fitted Graph since such a graph stems from sparse manifold fitting. To evaluate the robustness and effectiveness of M-fitted graphs, we leverage graph-based semisupervised learning as the testbed. Extensive experiments carried out on six benchmark datasets validate that the proposed M-fitted graph is superior to state-of-the-art neighborhood graphs in terms of classification accuracy using popular graph-based semi-supervised learning methods.