Non-negative consistency affinity graph learning for unsupervised feature selection and clustering

Feature selection plays a crucial role in data mining and pattern recognition tasks. This paper proposes an efficient method for robust unsupervised feature selection, called joint local preserving and low-rank representation with nonnegative and symmetric constraint (JLPLRNS). This approach utilizes an indicator matrix instead of the row sparsity of the projection matrix to directly select some significant features from the original data and adaptively preserves the local geometric structure of original data into the low-dimensional embedded feature subspace via learned indicator matrix. By simultaneously imposing nonnegative symmetric and low-rank constraints on the representation coefficient matrix, it cannot only make this matrix discriminative, sparse and weight consistency for each pair of data, but also uncover the global structure of original data. These effectively will improve clustering performance. An algorithm based on the augmented Lagrange multiplier method with an alternating direction strategy is designed to resolve this model. Experimental results on various real datasets show that the proposed method can effectively identify some important features in data and outperforms many state-of-the-art unsupervised feature selection methods in terms of clustering performance.