Information theory divergences in principal component analysis

The metric learning area studies methodologies to find the most appropriate distance function for a given dataset. It was shown that dimensionality reduction algorithms are closely related to metric learning because, in addition to obtaining a more compact representation of the data, such methods also implicitly derive a distance function that best represents similarity between a pair of objects in the collection. Principal Component Analysis is a traditional linear dimensionality reduction algorithm that is still widely used by researchers. However, its procedure faithfully represents outliers in the generated space, which can be an undesirable characteristic in pattern recognition applications. With this is mind, it was proposed the replacement of the traditional punctual approach by a contextual one based on the data samples neighborhoods. This approach implements a mapping from the usual feature space to a parametric feature space, where the difference between two samples is defined by the vector whose scalar coordinates are given by the statistical divergence between two probability distributions. It was demonstrated for some divergences that the new approach outperforms several existing dimensionality reduction algorithms in a wide range of datasets. Although, it is important to investigate the framework divergence sensitivity. Experiments using Total Variation, Renyi, Sharma-Mittal and Tsallis divergences are exhibited in this paper and the results evidence the method robustness.