Kernel Dimensionality Reduction for Supervised Learning

Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 16 (NIPS 2003)

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Authors

Kenji Fukumizu, Francis Bach, Michael Jordan

Abstract

We propose a novel method of dimensionality reduction for supervised learning. Given a regression or classification problem in which we wish to predict a variable Y from an explanatory vector X, we treat the prob- lem of dimensionality reduction as that of finding a low-dimensional “ef- fective subspace” of X which retains the statistical relationship between X and Y . We show that this problem can be formulated in terms of conditional independence. To turn this formulation into an optimization problem, we characterize the notion of conditional independence using covariance operators on reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces; this allows us to derive a contrast function for estimation of the effective subspace. Un- like many conventional methods, the proposed method requires neither assumptions on the marginal distribution of X, nor a parametric model of the conditional distribution of Y .