Relational generative topographic mapping

The generative topographic mapping (GTM) has been proposed as a statistical model to represent high-dimensional data by a distribution induced by a sparse lattice of points in a low-dimensional latent space, such that visualization, compression, and data inspection become possible. The formulation in terms of a generative statistical model has the benefit that relevant parameters of the model can be determined automatically based on an expectation maximization scheme. Further, the model offers a large flexibility such as a direct out-of-sample extension and the possibility to obtain different degrees of granularity of the visualization without the need of additional training. Original GTM is restricted to Euclidean data points in a given Euclidean vector space. Often, data are not explicitly embedded in a Euclidean vector space, rather pairwise dissimilarities of data can be computed, i.e. the relations between data points are given rather than the data vectors themselves. We propose a method which extends the GTM to relational data and which allows us to achieve a sparse representation of data characterized by pairwise dissimilarities, in latent space. The method, relational GTM, is demonstrated on several benchmarks.