Enhancing LS-PIE’s Optimal Latent Dimensional Identification: Latent Expansion and Latent Condensation

The Latent Space Perspicacity and Interpretation Enhancement (LS-PIE) framework enhances dimensionality reduction methods for linear latent variable models (LVMs). This paper extends LS-PIE by introducing an optimal latent discovery strategy to automate identifying optimal latent dimensions and projections based on user-defined metrics. The latent condensing (LCON) method clusters and condenses an extensive latent space into a compact form. A new approach, latent expansion (LEXP), incrementally increases latent dimensions using a linear LVM to find an optimal compact space. This study compares these methods across multiple datasets, including a simple toy problem, mixed signals, ECG data, and simulated vibrational data. LEXP can accelerate the discovery of optimal latent spaces and may yield different compact spaces from LCON, depending on the LVM. This paper highlights the LS-PIE algorithm’s applications and compares LCON and LEXP in organising, ranking, and scoring latent components akin to principal component analysis or singular value decomposition. This paper shows clear improvements in the interpretability of the resulting latent representations allowing for clearer and more focused analysis.