Selection of the optimal parameter value for the Isomap algorithm

The isometric feature mapping (Isomap) method has demonstrated promising results in finding low-dimensional manifolds from data points in high-dimensional input space. Isomap has one free parameter (number of nearest neighbours K or neighbourhood radius 6), which has to be specified manually. In this paper we present a new method for selecting the optimal parameter value for Isomap automatically. Numerous experiments on synthetic and real data sets show the effectiveness of our method. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.