2025/02/04 by Eppert, Martin, Mukherjee, Satyaki, Ghoshdastidar, Debarghya
#FOS: Computer and information sciences #Machine Learning (cs.LG)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2502.02668
Projection Pursuit is a classic exploratory technique for finding interesting projections of a dataset. We propose a method for recovering projections containing either Imbalanced Clusters or a Bernoulli-Rademacher distribution using a gradient-based technique to optimize the projection index. As sample complexity is a major limiting factor in Projection Pursuit, we analyze our algorithm's sample complexity within a Planted Vector setting where we can observe that Imbalanced Clusters can be recovered more easily than balanced ones. Additionally, we give a generalized result that works for a variety of data distributions and projection indices. We compare these results to computational lower bounds in the Low-Degree-Polynomial Framework. Finally, we experimentally evaluate our method's applicability to real-world data using FashionMNIST and the Human Activity Recognition Dataset, where our algorithm outperforms others when only a few samples are available.