Dear Madam or Sir,
I am very experienced with machine learning and statistics and Matlab. The tasks related you described, related to Isomap and PCA methods are very simple and I am sure, as a mathematician, I can solve them fast.
For example, I can explain you in detail how the ISOMAP algorithm uses the local structure(local distances) and then computes the geodesics on the whole datasets. On the other hand the PCA ist just a linear transformation and does not use the local structure. Hence, the first one is great, for example, if all the samples are on a sphere or a swiss role. In this case the PCA does not work at all. This could be used for the first answer.
In the second part I would use Isomap and kMeans clustering to do handwriting recognition, which is a great application and a classical experiment in machine learning or computer vision.
Please bear in mind that my bid is not the lowest but the quality of my work is top notch. I have rescued similar projects where other freelancer failed. Just have a look at my profile and reviews.
Please provide further details of the project. Should the solution use any toolboxes in matlab or just plain simple matlab code?
I am happy to chat with you.
Best regards
instantProgr