Dependence Guided Unsupervised Feature Selection

In many real-world unsupervised learning applications, given data with balanced distribution, that is, there are an approximately equal number of instances in each class, we often need to construct a model to reveal such balance. However, in many data, especially the high-dimensional ones, the data in the original feature space often do not present such balance due to the redundant and noisy features. To tackle this problem, we apply an unsupervised spectral feature selection method to select some informative features, which can better reveal the balanced structure of data. Although spectral feature selection is one of the most popular unsupervised feature selection methods and has been widely studied, none of the existing spectral feature selection methods consider the balance property of data. To address this issue, in this article, we propose a novel balanced spectral feature selection (BSFS) method, which not only selects the discriminative features but also picks those to reveal the balanced structure of data. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first spectral feature selection method considering balance structure of data. By introducing a balanced regularization term, we integrate the balanced spectral clustering and feature selection into a unified framework seamlessly. At last, the experiments on benchmark datasets show that the proposed one outperforms the conventional feature selection methods in both clustering performance and balance, which demonstrates the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method.

Performance in an engineering system tends to degrade over time due to a variety of wearing or ageing processes. In supervisory controlled processes there are typically many signals being monitored that may help to characterize performance degradation. It is preferred to select the least amount of information to obtain high quality of predictive analysis from a large amount of collected data, in which labeling the data is not always feasible. To this end a novel unsupervised feature selection method, robust with respect to significant measurement disturbances, is proposed using the notion of ``weak monotonicity'' (WM). The robustness of this notion makes it very attractive to identify the common trend in the presence of measurement noises and population variation from the collected data. Based on WM, a novel suitability indicator is proposed to evaluate the performance of each feature. This new indicator is then used to select the key features that contribute to the WM of a family of processes when noises and variations among processes exist. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed framework of the WM and suitability, a comparative study with other nine state-of-the-arts unsupervised feature evaluation and selection methods is carried out on well-known benchmark datasets. The results show a promising performance of the proposed framework on unsupervised feature evaluation in the presence of measurement noises and population variations.

Subspace distance is an invaluable tool exploited in a wide range of feature selection methods. The power of subspace distance is that it can identify a representative subspace, including a group of features that can efficiently approximate the space of original features. On the other hand, employing intrinsic statistical information of data can play a significant role in a feature selection process. Nevertheless, most of the existing feature selection methods founded on the subspace distance are limited in properly fulfilling this objective. To pursue this void, we propose a framework that takes a subspace distance into account which is called “Variance–Covariance subspace distance”. The approach gains advantages from the correlation of information included in the features of data, thus determines all the feature subsets whose corresponding Variance–Covariance matrix has the minimum norm property. Consequently, a novel, yet efficient unsupervised feature selection framework is introduced based on the Variance–Covariance distance to handle both the dimensionality reduction and subspace learning tasks. The proposed framework has the ability to exclude those features that have the least variance from the original feature set. Moreover, an efficient update algorithm is provided along with its associated convergence analysis to solve the optimization side of the proposed approach. An extensive number of experiments on nine benchmark datasets are also conducted to assess the performance of our method from which the results demonstrate its superiority over a variety of state-of-the-art unsupervised feature selection methods. The source code is available at https://github.com/SaeedKarami/VCSDFS.

Graph self-representation method for unsupervised feature selection

Feature selection plays a crucial role in scientific research and practical applications. In the real world applications, labeling data is time and labor consuming. Thus, unsupervised feature selection methods are desired for many practical applications. Linear discriminant analysis (LDA) with trace ratio criterion is a supervised dimensionality reduction method that has shown good performance to improve classifications. In this paper, we first propose a unified objective to seamlessly accommodate trace ratio formulation and K-means clustering procedure, such that the trace ratio criterion is extended to unsupervised model. After that, we propose a novel unsupervised feature selection method by integrating unsupervised trace ratio formulation and structured sparsity-inducing norms regularization. The proposed method can harness the discriminant power of trace ratio criterion, thus it tends to select discriminative features. Meanwhile, we also provide two important theorems to guarantee the unsupervised feature selection process. Empirical results on four benchmark data sets show that the proposed method outperforms other sate-of-the-art unsupervised feature selection algorithms in all three clustering evaluation metrics.

Non-convex regularized self-representation for unsupervised feature selection

Feature selection is selecting a subset of optimal features. Feature selection is being used in high dimensional data reduction and it is being used in several applications like medical, image processing, text mining, etc. Several methods were introduced for unsupervised feature selection. Among those methods some are based on filter approach and some are based on wrapper approach. In the existing work, unsupervised feature selection methods using Genetic Algorithm, Particle Swarm Optimization with Relative Reduct, Quick Reduct and Ant Colony Optimization have been introduced. These methods yield better performance for unsupervised feature selection. In this paper we proposed a novel method to select subset of features from unlabeled data using binary bat algorithm with sum of squared error as the fitness function. The proposed method is then tested with various classification algorithms like decision tree, multilayer perceptron, support vector machine and clustering quality measures like sum of squared error. The results show that our proposed method gives more accuracy when compared with other optimization algorithm.

Low-rank structure preserving for unsupervised feature selection

An unsupervised feature selection algorithm based on ant colony optimization

In many real applications, the collected data is usually high dimensionality of feature space and no labels are given, which will result in the “curse of dimensionality” problem and bring the challenge for the feature selection. Although tremendous efforts have been made in unsupervised feature selection, the existing methods neglect the robustness of jointly feature selection and clustering. In this paper, we present a robust simultaneous feature selection and clustering method. By introducing a robust loss function, the unsupervised linear discriminant analysis methods with two different strategies (the ratio trace and the trace ratio) are incorporated into this loss function, which can guarantee the selected features with robustness. Then two novel simultaneous unsupervised feature selection and clustering objective functions are presented by the proposed loss function equipped with $\ell_{2,1}$-norm. Two alternative iterative optimization algorithms are developed to solve these two objective functions. The comparative experimental results conducted on eight UCI datasets show that the proposed methods are better than other competing methods.

Orthogonally constrained matrix factorization for robust unsupervised feature selection with local preserving

The application of machine learning in health care often necessitates the use of hierarchical codes such as the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) and Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical (ATC) systems. These codes classify diseases and medications, respectively, thereby forming extensive data dimensions. Unsupervised feature selection tackles the "curse of dimensionality" and helps to improve the accuracy and performance of supervised learning models by reducing the number of irrelevant or redundant features and avoiding overfitting. Techniques for unsupervised feature selection, such as filter, wrapper, and embedded methods, are implemented to select the most important features with the most intrinsic information. However, they face challenges due to the sheer volume of ICD and ATC codes and the hierarchical structures of these systems. The objective of this study was to compare several unsupervised feature selection methods for ICD and ATC code databases of patients with coronary artery disease in different aspects of performance and complexity and select the best set of features representing these patients. We compared several unsupervised feature selection methods for 2 ICD and 1 ATC code databases of 51,506 patients with coronary artery disease in Alberta, Canada. Specifically, we used the Laplacian score, unsupervised feature selection for multicluster data, autoencoder-inspired unsupervised feature selection, principal feature analysis, and concrete autoencoders with and without ICD or ATC tree weight adjustment to select the 100 best features from over 9000 ICD and 2000 ATC codes. We assessed the selected features based on their ability to reconstruct the initial feature space and predict 90-day mortality following discharge. We also compared the complexity of the selected features by mean code level in the ICD or ATC tree and the interpretability of the features in the mortality prediction task using Shapley analysis. In feature space reconstruction and mortality prediction, the concrete autoencoder-based methods outperformed other techniques. Particularly, a weight-adjusted concrete autoencoder variant demonstrated improved reconstruction accuracy and significant predictive performance enhancement, confirmed by DeLong and McNemar tests (P<.05). Concrete autoencoders preferred more general codes, and they consistently reconstructed all features accurately. Additionally, features selected by weight-adjusted concrete autoencoders yielded higher Shapley values in mortality prediction than most alternatives. This study scrutinized 5 feature selection methods in ICD and ATC code data sets in an unsupervised context. Our findings underscore the superiority of the concrete autoencoder method in selecting salient features that represent the entire data set, offering a potential asset for subsequent machine learning research. We also present a novel weight adjustment approach for the concrete autoencoders specifically tailored for ICD and ATC code data sets to enhance the generalizability and interpretability of the selected features.

The rapid development of big data era incurs the generation of huge amount of data day by day in various fields. Due to the large-scale and high-dimensional characteristics of these data, it is often difficult to achieve better decision-making in practical applications. Therefore, an efficient big data analytical method is urgently necessary. For feature engineering, feature selection seems to be an important research topic which is anticipated to select “excellent” features from candidate ones. The implementation of feature selection can not only achieve the purpose of dimensionality reduction, but also improve the computational efficiency and result performance of the model. In many classification tasks, researchers found that data seem to be usually close to each other if they are from the same class; thus, local compactness is of great importance for the evaluation of a feature. Based on this discovery, we propose a fast unsupervised feature selection algorithm, named Compactness Score (CSUFS), to select desired features. To prove the superiority of the proposed algorithm, several public data sets are considered with extensive experiments being performed. The experiments are presented by applying feature subsets selected through several different algorithms to the clustering task. The performance of clustering tasks is indicated by two well-known evaluation metrics, while the efficiency is reflected by the corresponding running time. As demonstrated, our proposed algorithm is more accurate and efficient compared with existing ones.

The traditional learning machines suffer from the curse of dimensionality because of the data explosion in the areas of multi-media, social network, etc. Feature selection is an effective technique to reduce storage burden and time complexity, and improve generalization ability of the learned models. In real-world applications, the data can be collected from different modalities, or described from multi-views as well. Compared with supervised cases, it is more challenging to reduce the feature dimensionality of multi-view data in unsupervised circumstances. The key difficulty with multiview unsupervised feature selection is how to characterize the multi-view relationships. In this paper, we propose a novel method for multi-view unsupervised feature selection by imposing sparsity on both individual features and views. To exploit the complementary information, we also take the view importance into consideration without introducing explicit view weights. Experiments on benchmark datasets show on the proposed algorithm outperforms other unsupervised feature selection methods.

Simultaneous positive sequential vectors modeling and unsupervised feature selection via continuous hidden Markov models