Analytical solutions to the dimensionality reduction problem are only possible for quadratic cost functions, like Isomap, LLE, Laplacian Eigenmaps, … All these solutions are sensitive to outliers. The issue with the quadratic hypothesis is that there is no outilers, but on real manifolds, the noise is always there.
Some cost functions have been proposed, also known as stress functions as they measure the difference between the estimated geodesic distance and the computed Euclidien distance in the “feature” space. Every metric MDS can be used as stress functions, here are some of them.