Shape Operator PCA: Curvature-Aware Projections for Geometric Machine Learning

Excerpt

arXiv:2608.15313v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this paper, we propose SHOPCA (Shape Operator-based Principal Component Analysis), a novel method for unsupervised metric learning and dimensionality reduction that incorporates differential geometric information into the covariance structure of classical PCA. SHOPCA regularizes the global covariance matrix using the mean shape operator, defined as the average of the absolute local shape operators estimated from the data manifold, steering pri