Adaptive dictionary and structure learning for unsupervised feature selection

Unsupervised feature selection is very attractive in many practical applications, as it needs no semantic labels during the learning process. However, the absence of semantic labels makes the unsupervised feature selection more challenging, as the method can be affected by the noise, redundancy, or missing in the originally extracted features. Currently, most methods either consider the influence of noise for sparse learning or think over the internal structure information of the data, leading to suboptimal results. To relieve these limitations and improve the effectiveness of unsupervised feature selection, we propose a novel method named Adaptive Dictionary and Structure Learning (ADSL) that conducts spectral learning and sparse dictionary learning in a unified framework. Specifically, we adaptively update the dictionary based on sparse dictionary learning. And, we also introduce the spectral learning method of adaptive updating affinity matrix. While removing redundant features, the intrinsic structure of the original data can be retained. In addition, we adopt matrix completion in our framework to make it competent for fixing the missing data problem. We validate the effectiveness of our method on several public datasets. Experimental results show that our model not only outperforms some state-of-the-art methods on complete datasets but also achieves satisfying results on incomplete datasets.