Graph connectivity in sparse subspace clustering

Sparse Subspace Clustering (SSC) is one of the recent approaches to subspace segmentation. In SSC a graph is constructed whose nodes are the data points and whose edges are inferred from the L¹-sparse representation of each point by the others. It has been proved that if the points lie on a mixture of independent subspaces, the graphical structure of each subspace is disconnected from the others. However, the problem of connectivity within each subspace is still unanswered. This is important since the subspace segmentation in SSC is based on finding the connected components of the graph. Our analysis is built upon the connection between the sparse representation through L¹-norm minimization and the geometry of convex poly-topes proposed by the compressed sensing community. After introduction of some assumptions to make the problem well-defined, it is proved that the connectivity within each subspace holds for 2- and 3-dimensional subspaces. The claim of connectivity for general d-dimensional case, even for generic configurations, is proved false by giving a counterexample in dimensions greater than 3.