Nonlinear Alignment and Its Local Linear Iterative Solution

In manifold learning, the aim of alignment is to derive the global coordinate of manifold from the local coordinates of manifold’s patches. At present, most of manifold learning algorithms assume that the relation between the global and local coordinates is locally linear and based on this linear relation align the local coordinates of manifold’s patches into the global coordinate of manifold. There are two contributions in this paper. First, the nonlinear relation between the manifold’s global and local coordinates is deduced by making use of the differentiation of local pullback functions defined on the differential manifold. Second, the method of local linear iterative alignment is used to align the manifold’s local coordinates into the manifold’s global coordinate. The experimental results presented in this paper show that the errors of noniterative alignment are considerably large and can be reduced to almost zero within the first two iterations. The large errors of noniterative/linear alignment verify the nonlinear nature of alignment and justify the necessity of iterative alignment.