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Multi-time-scale stochastic dynamical systems are ubiquitous in science and engineering, and the reduction of such systems and their models to only their slow components is often essential for scientific computation and further analysis. Rather than being available in the form of an explicit analytical model, often such systems can only be observed as a data set which embodies dynamics on several time scales. We focus on applying and adapting data-mining and manifold learning techniques to detect the slow components in a class of such multiscale data. Traditional data-mining methods are based on metrics (and thus, geometries) which are not informed of the multiscale nature of the underlying system dynamics; such methods cannot successfully recover the slow variables. Here, we present an approach which utilizes both the local geometry and the local noise dynamics within the data set through a metric which is both insensitive to the fast variables and more general than simple statistical averaging. Our analysis of the approach provides conditions for successfully recovering the underlying slow variables, as well as an empirical protocol guiding the selection of the method parameters. Interestingly, the recovered underlying variables are gauge invariant--they are insensitive to the measuring instrument/observation function. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]