Neighborhood preserving embedding with autoencoder

Abstract

Neighborhood preserving embedding (NPE) is a classical method for dimensionality reduction (DR), and it is a linear version of the locally linear embedding method. However, NPE and all its variants only consider the one-way mapping from high-dimensional space to low-dimensional space. The projected low-dimensional data may not accurately and effectively “represent” the original samples. To address this problem, we improve NPE based on linear autoencoder. The conventional projection of NPE is considered as the encoding stage, and the decoder stage is a reconstruction from the low-dimensional space to the original high-dimensional space, which is the key to maintaining more significant information. Based on this, we propose a new NPE method called NPEAE (neighborhood preserving embedding with autoencoder) in this paper. NPEAE performs excellently in face recognition, handwritten character categorization, object classification, etc. The experiments on MNIST, COIL-20, the Extended Yale B, Olivetti Research Laboratory (ORL), and FERET show that NPEAE has a higher recognition accuracy than other comparative methods.