Recently, various embedded methods for unsupervised feature selection have been put forward. However, most of them adopt a two-step strategy, i.e., selecting$k$top-ranked dimensions according to a learned order of all features, then conducting K-means clustering for evaluation. This commonly used strategy usually results in a group of sub-optimal features, because the selected$k$top-ranked features are seldom the desired top-$k$dimensions. To address this problem, we rethink the two steps in a joint manner and propose a simple yet effective approach calledUnsupervisedFeatureSelection withSeparability (UFS$^{\mathbf{2}}$2) to simultaneously select features and cluster data. More specifically, a binary vector is seamlessly integrated into K-means to select an exact number of features for clustering. Different from previous embedded methods involving$l_{2,1}$-norm, our joint model explicitly uses the parameter$k$(i.e., the number of selected features). Afterwards, a customized term for the binary vector is designed to maximize the separability among selected feature dimensions. In order to solve the formulated 0-1 integer programming problem, an iterative algorithm is developed. Finally, we evaluate the proposed approach extensively on different datasets. Despite the relative simplicity, UFS$^{2}$remarkably and generally outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.

To better pre-process unlabeled data, most existing feature selection methods remove redundant and noisy information by exploring some intrinsic structures embedded in samples. However, these unsupervised studies focus too much on the relations among samples, totally neglecting the feature-level geometric information. This paper proposes an unsupervised triplet-induced graph to explore a new type of potential structure at feature level, and incorporates it into simultaneous feature selection and clustering. In the feature selection part, we design an ordinal consensus preserving term based on a triplet-induced graph. This term enforces the projection vectors to preserve the relative proximity of original features, which contributes to selecting more relevant features. In the clustering part, Self-Paced Learning (SPL) is introduced to gradually learn from ‘easy’ to ‘complex’ samples. SPL alleviates the dilemma of falling into the bad local minima incurred by noise and outliers. Specifically, we propose a compelling regularizer for SPL to obtain a robust loss. Finally, an alternating minimization algorithm is developed to efficiently optimize the proposed model. Extensive experiments on different benchmark datasets consistently demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method.

In the past decade, various unsupervised hashing methods have been developed for cross-modal retrieval. However, in real-world applications, it is often the incomplete case that every modality of data may suffer from some missing samples. Most existing works assume that every object appears in both modalities, hence they may not work well for partial multi-modal data. To address this problem, we propose a novel Collective Affinity Learning Method (CALM), which collectively and adaptively learns an anchor graph for generating binary codes on partial multi-modal data. In CALM, we first construct modality-specific bipartite graphs collectively, and derive a probabilistic model to figure out complete data-to-anchor affinities for each modality. Theoretical analysis reveals its ability to recover missing adjacency information. Moreover, a robust model is proposed to fuse these modality-specific affinities by adaptively learning a unified anchor graph. Then, the neighborhood information from the learned anchor graph acts as feedback, which guides the previous affinity reconstruction procedure. To solve the formulated optimization problem, we further develop an effective algorithm with linear time complexity and fast convergence. Last, Anchor Graph Hashing (AGH) is conducted on the fused affinities for cross-modal retrieval. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show that our proposed CALM consistently outperforms the existing methods.

Clustering on multi-view data has attracted much more attention in the past decades. Most previous studies assume that each instance appears in all views, or there is at least one view containing all instances. However, real world data often suffers from missing some instances in each view, leading to the research problem of partial multi-view clustering. To address this issue, this paper proposes a simple yet effective Anchorbased Partial Multi-view Clustering (APMC) method, which utilizes anchors to reconstruct instance-to-instance relationships for clustering. APMC is conceptually simple and easy to implement in practice, besides it has clear intuitions and non-trivial empirical guarantees. Specifically, APMC firstly integrates intra- and inter- view similarities through anchors. Then, spectral clustering is performed on the fused similarities to obtain a unified clustering result. Compared with existing partial multi-view clustering methods, APMC has three notable advantages: 1) it can capture more non-linear relations among instances with the help of kernel-based similarities; 2) it has a much lower time complexity in virtue of a noniterative scheme; 3) it can inherently handle data with negative entries as well as be extended to more than two views. Finally, we extensively evaluate the proposed method on five benchmark datasets. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of APMC over state-of-the-art approaches.

In this paper, we propose a novel Human-like Semantic Cognition Network (HSCN) for aspect-level sentiment classification, motivated by the principles of human beings’ reading cognitive process (pre-reading, active reading, post-reading). We first design a word-level interactive perception module to capture the correlation between context words and the given target words, which can be regarded as pre-reading. Second, to mimic the process of active reading, we propose a targetaware semantic distillation module to produce the targetspecific context representation for aspect-level sentiment prediction. Third, we further devise a semantic deviation metric module to measure the semantic deviation between the targetspecific context representation and the given target, which evaluates the degree we understand the target-specific context semantics. The measured semantic deviation is then used to fine-tune the above active reading process in a feedback regulation way. To verify the effectiveness of our approach, we conduct extensive experiments on three widely used datasets. The experiments demonstrate that HSCN achieves impressive results compared to other strong competitors.

Microlending can lead to improved access to capital in impoverished countries. Recommender systems could be used in microlending to provide efficient and personalized service to lenders. However, increasing concerns about discrimination in machine learning hinder the application of recommender systems to the microfinance industry. Most previous recommender systems focus on pure personalization, with fairness issue largely ignored. A desirable fairness property in microlending is to give borrowers from different demographic groups a fair chance of being recommended, as stated by Kiva. To achieve this goal, we propose a Fairness-Aware Re-ranking (FAR) algorithm to balance ranking quality and borrower-side fairness. Furthermore, we take into consideration that lenders may differ in their receptivity to the diversification of recommended loans, and develop a Personalized Fairness-Aware Re-ranking (PFAR) algorithm. Experiments on a real-world dataset from Kiva.org show that our re-ranking algorithm can significantly promote fairness with little sacrifice in accuracy, and be attentive to individual lender preference on loan diversity.

Semantic image segmentation can be accomplished by assigning a proper object category label to each meaningful region of an image. Beyond the original bottom-up models, the use of top-down categorization information has been applied to semantic segmentation to improve performance. An excellent example of such a top-down scheme is to integrate a Conditional Random Field (CRF) model with sparse dictionary learning. However, the existing solutions merely consider the discrimination of dictionaries to obtain better sparse codes, without considering the inherent data locality characteristics. In this paper, we explore such characteristics and propose a novel semantic segmentation framework based on an innovative CRF model with locality-consistent dictionary learning. In particular, we propose two new locality-consistent dictionary learning strategies by capturing the local consistencies in the feature space and the label space. In addition, we develop a joint dictionary and a CRF model parameter learning algorithm to seamlessly integrate the proposed locality-consistent dictionary learning strategies into the CRF model. Extensive experiments are conducted with two popular databases of different traits (i.e., Graz-02 and PASCAL-CONTEXT). The simulation results confirm the efficiency of the proposed scheme, especially when training data are limited.

In the past decade, various multi-view outlier detection methods have been designed to detect horizontal outliers that exhibit inconsistent across-view characteristics. The existing works assume that all objects are present in all views. However, in real-world applications, it is often the incomplete case that every view may suffer from some missing samples, resulting in partial objects difficult to detect outliers from. To address this problem, we propose a novel Collective Learning (CL) based framework to detect outliers from partial multi-view data in a self-guided way. More specifically, by well exploiting the inter-dependence among different views, we develop an algorithm to reconstruct missing samples based on learning. Furthermore, we propose similarity-based outlier detection to break through the dilemma that the number of clusters is unknown priori. Then, the calculated outlier scores act as the confidence levels in CL and in turn guide the reconstruction of missing data. Learning-based missing sample recovery and similarity-based outlier detection are iteratively performed in a self-guided manner. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show that our proposed approach consistently and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.

In the past decade, various sparse learning based unsupervised feature selection methods have been developed. However, most existing studies adopt a two-step strategy, i.e., selecting the top-m features according to a calculated descending order and then performing K-means clustering, resulting in a group of sub-optimal features. To address this problem, we propose a Dependence Guided Unsupervised Feature Selection (DGUFS) method to select features and partition data in a joint manner. Our proposed method enhances the inter-dependence among original data, cluster labels, and selected features. In particular, a projection-free feature selection model is proposed based on l20-norm equality constraints. We utilize the learned cluster labels to fill in the information gap between original data and selected features. Two dependence guided terms are consequently proposed for our model. More specifically, one term increases the dependence of desired cluster labels on original data, while the other term maximizes the dependence of selected features on cluster labels to guide the process of feature selection. Last but not least, an iterative algorithm based on Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) is designed to solve the constrained minimization problem efficiently. Extensive experiments on different datasets consistently demonstrate that our proposed method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.

Unsupervised feature selection has shown significant potential in distance-based clustering tasks. This paper proposes a novel triplet induced method. Firstly, a triplet-based loss function is introduced to enforce the selected feature groups to preserve ordinal locality of original data, which contributes to distance-based clustering tasks. Secondly, we simplify the orthogonal basis clustering by imposing an orthogonal constraint on the feature projection matrix. Consequently, a general framework for simultaneous feature selection and clustering is discussed. Thirdly, an alternating minimization algorithm is employed to efficiently optimize the proposed model together with rapid convergence. Extensive comparison experiments on several benchmark datasets well validate the encouraging gain in clustering from our proposed method.

Dictionary learning (DL) plays an important role in pattern classification. However, learning a discriminative dictionary has not been well addressed in analysis dictionary learning (ADL). This letter proposes a Class-aware Analysis Dictionary Learning (CADL) model to improve the classification performance of conventional ADL. The objective function of CADL mainly includes two parts to promote the discriminability. The first part aims to learn a discriminative analysis subdictionary for each class instead of a global dictionary for all classes. The learned analysis dictionary is class-aware, generating a block-diagonal coding coefficient matrix. The second part aims to enhance the discrimination of coding coefficients by integrating a max-margin regularization term into our proposed framework. This term ensures the coefficients of different classes to be separated by a max-margin, which boosts the confidence of classification. A theoretical analysis is also given to support the max-margin regularization term from the perspective of preserving the pairwise relations of samples in coding space. We employ an alternating minimization algorithm to iteratively find the convergent solution. By evaluating our method on four pattern classification datasets, we demonstrate the superiority of our CADL method to the state-of-the-art DL methods.

Dictionary learning (DL) has been successfully applied to various pattern classification tasks in recent years. However, analysis dictionary learning (ADL), as a major branch of DL, has not yet been fully exploited in classification due to its poor discriminability. This paper presents a novel DL method, namely Discriminative Analysis Dictionary Learning (DADL), to improve the classification performance of ADL. First, a code consistent term is integrated into the basic analysis model to improve discriminability. Second, a triplet constraint-based local topology preserving loss function is introduced to capture the discriminative geometrical structures embedded in data. Third, correntropy induced metric is employed as a robust measure to better control outliers for classification. Then, half-quadratic minimization and alternate search strategy are used to speed up the optimization process so that there exist closed-form solutions in each alternating minimization stage. Experiments on several commonly used databases show that our proposed method not only significantly improves the discriminative ability of ADL, but also outperforms state-of-the-art synthesis DL methods.

In recent years, dictionary learning (DL) has shown significant potential in various classification tasks. However, most of previous works aim to learn a synthesis dictionary. The other major category of DL-analysis dictionary learning has not been fully exploited yet. This paper proposes a novel DL method, named Topology Preserving Dictionary Learning (TPDL). First, we propose a triplet-constraint-based topology preserving loss function to capture the underlying local topological structures of data in a supervised manner. Second, a sparse-label-matrix-based function is integrated into the basic analysis model to improve discriminative ability. Third, Huber M-estimator is employed as a robust metric to handle the errors (e.g., outliers and noise) that possibly exist in data. Then, an alternating optimization algorithm is developed based on half-quadratic minimization and alternate search strategy. Closed-form solutions in each alternating optimization stage speed up the minimization process. Experiments on four commonly used datasets show that our proposed TPDL achieves competitive performance in contrast to state-of-the-art DL methods.

Discriminative dictionary learning (DDL) has been applied to various pattern classification problems. Despite satisfying experimental results, most existing discriminative dictionary learning methods emphasize too much on the role of l0or l1-norm sparsity, while the underlying local structure of original data is totally ignored. In this paper, we present a novel dictionary learning method, named Locality Sensitive Discriminative Dictionary Learning (LSDDL), which combines basic dictionary learning scheme and locality relationship of original data which is propagated to the coding vectors. The learned discriminative dictionary can map the original data points into a new space in which the nearby points with the same label are close to each other while the nearby points with different labels are far apart. Experiments clearly show that our method has very competitive performance in contrast to previous discriminative dictionary learning methods.