Tuesday, 11 September 2012

Multidimensional Scaling - Group B


Aditya Narayanan
Operations
Roll No. 14125
Group B

Multidimensional scaling (MDS) is a set of related statistical techniques often used in information visualization for exploring similarities or dissimilarities in data. MDS is a special case of ordination. An MDS algorithm starts with a matrix of item–item similarities, and then assigns a location to each item in N-dimensional space, where N is specified beforehand. For sufficiently small N, the resulting locations may be displayed in a graph or 3D visualisation.

MDS algorithms fall into a taxonomy, depending on the meaning of the input matrix:

Classical multidimensional scaling
It is also known as Principal Coordinates Analysis, Torgerson Scaling or Torgerson–Gower scaling. It takes an input matrix giving dissimilarities between pairs of items and outputs a coordinate matrix whose configuration minimizes a loss function called strain.

Metric multidimensional scaling
It is a superset of classical MDS that generalizes the optimization procedure to a variety of loss functions and input matrices of known distances with weights and so on. A useful loss function in this context is called stress, which is often minimized using a procedure called stress majorization.

Non-metric multidimensional scaling
In contrast to metric MDS, non-metric MDS finds both a non-parametric monotonic relationship between the dissimilarities in the item-item matrix and the Euclidean distances between items, and the location of each item in the low-dimensional space. The relationship is typically found using isotonic regression. Louis Guttman's smallest space analysis (SSA) is an example of a non-metric MDS procedure.

Generalized multidimensional scaling
It is an extension of metric multidimensional scaling, in which the target space is an arbitrary smooth non-Euclidean space. In case when the dissimilarities are distances on a surface and the target space is another surface, GMDS allows finding the minimum-distortion embedding of one surface into another.

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