Minimax Rates and Improved Spectral Convergence for Multi-Manifold Clustering

Abstract:We study eigenpair estimation for the tensorized, density-weighted Laplace--Beltrami operator from $n$ independent data points sampled from a multi-manifold mixture distribution where manifolds may intersect. Let $d$ denote the largest intrinsic dimension of the manifold components and $s\geq2$ the smoothness of the sampling densities. For simple, nontrivial eigenpairs, we establish the minimax rate $n^{-s/(d+2s)}$ for approximating the eigenvalue and eigenfunction of the tensorized Laplace--Beltrami operator, and show that a continuum plug-in estimator based on kernel density estimation attains the same rate when the supporting manifolds are known. We further analyze a manifold-agnostic graph Laplacian estimator and prove that its eigenpairs converge to those of the tensorized Laplace--Beltrami operator at rate $n^{-1/(2.5d-1)}$, up to logarithmic factors, improving upon previously known spectral convergence rates for multi-manifold learning. Numerical experiments on synthetic multi-manifold data corroborate the rates guaranteed by our theorems. These results characterize the information-theoretic difficulty of multi-manifold spectral estimation and quantify the additional cost of learning without oracle component information.

Machine Learning (stat.ML); Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2610.15892 [stat.ML]

(or arXiv:2610.15892v1 [stat.ML] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.15892 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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