Unsupervised feature selection for large data sets

Abstract

The last decade saw a considerable increase in the availability of data. Unfortunately, this increase was overshadowed by various technical difficulties that arise when analysing large data sets. These include long processing times, large requirements for data storage, and other technical issues related to the analysis of high-dimensional data sets. By consequence, reducing the cardinality of data sets (with minimum information loss) has become of interest to virtually any data scientist. Many feature selection algorithms have been introduced in the literature, however, there are two main issues with these. First, the vast majority of such algorithms require labelled samples to learn from. One should note it is often too expensive to label a meaningful amount of data, particularly when dealing with large data sets. Second, these algorithms were not designed to deal with the volume of data we have nowadays. This paper introduces a novel unsupervised feature selection algorithm designed specifically to deal with large data sets. Our experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method.