Purpose: Isometric feature mapping (Isomap) is a very popular manifold learning method and is widely used in dimensionality reduction and data visualization. The most time-consuming step in Isomap is to compute the shortest paths between all pairs of data points based on a neighbourhood graph. The classical Isomap (C-Isomap) is very slow, due to the use of Floyd’s algorithm to compute the shortest paths. The purpose of this paper is to speed up Isomap. Design/methodology/approach: Through theoretical analysis, it is found that the neighbourhood graph in Isomap is sparse. In this case, th...