An Unsupervised Feature Extraction Approach Based on Self-Expression

Feature extraction algorithms lack good interpretability during the projection learning. To solve this problem, an unsupervised feature extraction algorithm, that is, block diagonal projection (BDP), based on self-expression is proposed. Specifically, if the original data are projected into a low-dimensional subspace by a feature extraction algorithm, although the data may be more compact, the new features obtained may not be as explanatory as the original sample features. Therefore, by imposing L2,1 norm constraint on the projection matrix, the projection matrix can be of row sparsity. On one hand, discriminative features can be selected to make the projection matrix to be more interpretable. On the other hand, irrelevant or redundant features can be suppressed. The proposed model integrates feature extraction and selection into one framework. In addition, since self-expression can well excavate the correlation between samples or sample features, the unsupervised feature extraction task can be better guided using this property between them. At the same time, the block diagonal representation regular term is introduced to directly pursue the block diagonal representation. Thus, the accuracy of pattern recognition tasks such as clustering and classification can be improved. Finally, the effectiveness of BDP in linear dimensionality reduction and classification is proved on various reference datasets. The experimental results show that this algorithm is superior to previous feature extraction counterparts.