Manifold Elastic Net: A Unified Framework for Sparse Dimension Reduction

It is difficult to find the optimal sparse solution of a manifold learning based dimensionality reduction algorithm. The lasso or the elastic net penalized manifold learning based dimensionality reduction is not directly a lasso penalized least square problem and thus the least angle regression (LARS) (Efron et al. \cite{LARS}), one of the most popular algorithms in sparse learning, cannot be applied. Therefore, most current approaches take indirect ways or have strict settings, which can be inconvenient for applications. In this paper, we proposed the manifold elastic net or MEN for short. MEN incorporates the merits of both the manifold learning based dimensionality reduction and the sparse learning based dimensionality reduction. By using a series of equivalent transformations, we show MEN is equivalent to the lasso penalized least square problem and thus LARS is adopted to obtain the optimal sparse solution of MEN. In particular, MEN has the following advantages for subsequent classification: 1) the local geometry of samples is well preserved for low dimensional data representation, 2) both the margin maximization and the classification error minimization are considered for sparse projection calculation, 3) the projection matrix of MEN improves the parsimony in computation, 4) the elastic net penalty reduces the over-fitting problem, and 5) the projection matrix of MEN can be interpreted psychologically and physiologically. Experimental evidence on face recognition over various popular datasets suggests that MEN is superior to top level dimensionality reduction algorithms.Comment: 33 pages, 12 figure

Adaptive Graph via Multiple Kernel Learning for Nonnegative Matrix Factorization

Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF) has been continuously evolving in several areas like pattern recognition and information retrieval methods. It factorizes a matrix into a product of 2 low-rank non-negative matrices that will define parts-based, and linear representation of nonnegative data. Recently, Graph regularized NMF (GrNMF) is proposed to find a compact representation,which uncovers the hidden semantics and simultaneously respects the intrinsic geometric structure. In GNMF, an affinity graph is constructed from the original data space to encode the geometrical information. In this paper, we propose a novel idea which engages a Multiple Kernel Learning approach into refining the graph structure that reflects the factorization of the matrix and the new data space. The GrNMF is improved by utilizing the graph refined by the kernel learning, and then a novel kernel learning method is introduced under the GrNMF framework. Our approach shows encouraging results of the proposed algorithm in comparison to the state-of-the-art clustering algorithms like NMF, GrNMF, SVD etc.Comment: This paper has been withdrawn by the author due to the terrible writin