Feature selection using class-level regularized self-representation

Feature selection aims at selecting representative features from the original high-dimensional feature set, and it has drawn much attention in most real-world applications like data mining and pattern recognition. This paper studies feature selection problem from the viewpoint of feature self-representation. Traditionally, feature self-representation is only performed on the whole-level reconstruction, whereas the feature selection ability is insufficient owing to the intra-class variations. To address this problem, we propose a new feature selection method, i.e., class-level regularized self-representation (CLRSR). In the proposed method, a class-level reconstruction term is designed to reduce intra-class variations of the samples from different categories. By jointly optimizing the whole-level reconstruction and the class-level reconstruction, CLRSR is able to select more discriminative and informative features. Moreover, an iterative algorithm is proposed to minimize cost function of CLRSR, and its convergence is proven in theory. By comparing with several state-of-the-art feature selection methods, experimental evaluations on six benchmark datasets have verified effectiveness and superiority of CLRSR.