abstract = "Manifold learning methods are an invaluable tool in
todays world of increasingly huge datasets. Manifold
learning algorithms can discover a much
lower-dimensional representation (embedding) of a
high-dimensional dataset through non-linear
transformations that preserve the most important
structure of the original data. State-of-the-art
manifold learning methods directly optimise an
embedding without mapping between the original space
and the discovered embedded space. This makes
interpretability, a key requirement in exploratory data
analysis, nearly impossible. Recently, genetic
programming has emerged as a very promising approach to
manifold learning by evolving functional mappings from
the original space to an embedding. However, genetic
programming-based manifold learning has struggled to
match the performance of other approaches. In this
work, we propose a new approach to using genetic
programming for manifold learning, which preserves
local topology. This is expected to significantly
improve performance on tasks where local neighbourhood
structure (topology) is paramount. We compare our
proposed approach with various baseline manifold
learning methods and find that it often outperforms
other methods, including a clear improvement over
previous genetic programming approaches. These results
are particularly promising, given the potential
interpretability and reusability of the evolved
mappings.",
notes = "Evolutionary Computation Research Group (ECRG),
Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington 6140, New
Zealand