Towards a theoretical foundation for laplacian-based manifold methods

  • Authors:
  • Mikhail Belkin;Partha Niyogi

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science, The University of Chicago;Department of Computer Science, The University of Chicago

  • Venue:
  • COLT'05 Proceedings of the 18th annual conference on Learning Theory
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

In recent years manifold methods have attracted a considerable amount of attention in machine learning. However most algorithms in that class may be termed “manifold-motivated” as they lack any explicit theoretical guarantees. In this paper we take a step towards closing the gap between theory and practice for a class of Laplacian-based manifold methods. We show that under certain conditions the graph Laplacian of a point cloud converges to the Laplace-Beltrami operator on the underlying manifold. Theorem 1 contains the first result showing convergence of a random graph Laplacian to manifold Laplacian in the machine learning context.