Nonlinear dimensionality reduction with relative distance comparison

This paper proposes a new algorithm for nonlinear dimensionality reduction. Our basic idea is to explore and exploit the local geometry of the manifold with relative distance comparisons. All such comparisons derived from local neighborhoods are enumerated to constrain the manifold to be learned. The task is formulated as a problem of quadratically constrained quadratic programming (QCQP). However, such a QCQP problem is not convex. We relax it to be a problem of semi-definite programming (SDP), from which a globally optimal embedding is obtained. Experimental results illustrate the validity of our algorithm.