title: Improving dimensionality reduction with spectral gradient descent.
abstract: We introduce spectral gradient descent, a way of improving iterative dimensionality reduction techniques. The method uses information contained in the leading eigenvalues of a data affinity matrix to modify the steps taken during a gradient-based optimization procedure. We show that the approach is able to speed up the optimization and to help dimensionality reduction methods find better local minima of their objective functions. We also provide an interpretation of our approach in terms of the power method for finding the leading eigenvalues of a symmetric matrix and verify the usefulness of the approach in some simple experiments.
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ont., Canada. roland@cs.toronto.edu
authors.forename: Roland
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Memisevic
authors.forename: Geoffrey
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Hinton
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D001185:Artificial Intelligence; D016000:Cluster Analysis; D003627:Data Interpretation, Statistical; D015233:Models, Statistical; D017711:Nonlinear Dynamics; D025341:Principal Component Analysis; D013269:Stochastic Processes