Orthogonal margin discriminant projection for dimensionality reduction

Abstract

Dimensionality reduction aims to represent high-dimensional data with much smaller number of features, which plays as a preprocessing step to remove the insignificant and irrelevant features in many machine learning applications, resulting in lower computational cost and better performance of classifiers. In most cases, the data points can be well classified with margin samples which are defined as furthest intra-class samples and nearest inter-class samples. Motivated by this observation, this paper proposes a linear supervised dimensionality reduction method called orthogonal margin discriminant projection (OMDP). After OMDP projection, intra-class data points become more compact and inter-class data points become more separated. Extensive experiments have been conducted to evaluate the proposed OMDP algorithm using several benchmark face data sets. The experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method.