Low-Rank Representation over the Manifold of Curves

Abstract: In machine learning it is common to interpret each data point as a vector in Euclidean space. However the data may actually be functional i.e.\ each data point is a function of some variable such as time and the function is discretely sampled. The naive treatment of functional data as traditional multivariate data can lead to poor performance since the algorithms are ignoring the correlation in the curvature of each function. In this paper we propose a method to analyse subspace structure of the functional data by using the state of the art Low-Rank Representation (LRR). Experimental evaluation on synthetic and real data reveals that this method massively outperforms conventional LRR in tasks concerning functional data.