Abstract

We present an algorithm for finding landmarks along a manifold. These landmarks provide a small set of locations spaced out along the manifold such that they capture the low-dimensional nonlinear structure of the data embedded in the high-dimensional space. The approach does not select points directly from the dataset, but instea we optimize each landmark by moving along the continuous manifold space (as approximated by the data) according to the gradient of an objective function. We borrow ideas from active learning with Gaussian processes to define the objective, which has the property that a new landmark is “repelled” by those currently selected, allowing for exploration of the manifold. We derive a stochastic algorithm for learning with large datasets and show results on several datasets, including the Million Song Dataset and articles from the New York Times.