Local and Global Discriminative Learning for Unsupervised Feature Selection

In this paper, we consider the problem of feature selection in unsupervised learning scenario. Recently, spectral feature selection methods, which leverage both the graph Laplacian and the learning mechanism, have received considerable attention. However, when there are lots of irrelevant or noisy features, such graphs may not be reliable and then mislead the selection of features. In this paper, we propose the Local and Global Discriminative learning for unsupervised Feature Selection (LGDFS), which integrates a global and a set of locally linear regression model with weighted l₂-norm regularization into a unified learning framework. By exploring the discriminative and geometrical information in the weighted feature space, which alleviates the effects of the irrelevant features, our approach can find the most representative features to well respect the cluster structure of the data. Experimental results on several benchmark data sets are provided to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.