Robust Unsupervised Feature Selection via Multi-Group Adaptive Graph Representation

Abstract

Unsupervised feature selection can play an important role in addressing the issue of processing massive unlabelled high-dimensional data in the domain of machine learning and data mining. This paper presents a novel unsupervised feature selection method, referred to as Multi-Group Adaptive Graph Representation (MGAGR). Different from existing methods, the relationship between features is explored via the global similarity matrix, which is reconstructed by local similarities of multiple groups. Specifically, the similarity of a feature compared to other features can be represented by the linear combination of all the local similarities. The local similarity of a representative group is given a large weight to reconstruct the global similarity. Besides, an iterative algorithm is given to solve the optimization problem, in which the global similarity matrix, its corresponding reconstruction weights and the self-representation matrix are iteratively improved. Experimental results on 8 benchmark datasets demonstrates that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art unsupervised feature selection methods in terms of clustering performance. The source code is available at: <uri xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://github.com/misteru/MGAGR</uri> .