Sequential Learning of Principal Curves: Summarizing Data Streams on the Fly

When confronted with massive data streams, summarizing data with dimension reduction methods such as PCA raises theoretical and algorithmic pitfalls. Principal curves act as a nonlinear generalization of PCA and the present paper proposes a novel algorithm to automatically and sequentially learn principal curves from data streams. We show that our procedure is supported by regret bounds with optimal sublinear remainder terms. A greedy local search implementation (called textttslpc, for Sequential Learning Principal Curves) that incorporates both sleeping experts and multi-armed bandit ingredients is presented, along with its regret computation and performance on synthetic and real-life data.