Preservation of local linearity by neighborhood subspace scaling for solving the pre-image problem

An important issue involved in kernel methods is the pre-image problem. However, it is an ill-posed problem, as the solution is usually nonexistent or not unique. In contrast to direct methods aimed at minimizing the distance in feature space, indirect methods aimed at constructing approximate equivalent models have shown outstanding performance. In this paper, an indirect method for solving the pre-image problem is proposed. In the proposed algorithm, an inverse mapping process is constructed based on a novel framework that preserves local linearity. In this framework, a local nonlinear transformation is implicitly conducted by neighborhood subspace scaling transformation to preserve the local linearity between feature space and input space. By extending the inverse mapping process to test samples, we can obtain pre-images in input space. The proposed method is non-iterative, and can be used for any kernel functions. Experimental results based on image denoising using kernel principal component analysis (PCA) show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods for solving the pre-image problem.