Simultaneous feature selection and symmetry based clustering using multiobjective framework

In this paper a new framework based on multiobjective optimization (MOO), namely FeaClusMOO, is proposed which is capable of identifying the correct partitioning as well as the most relevant set of features from a data set. A newly developed multiobjective simulated annealing based optimization technique namely archived multiobjective simulated annealing (AMOSA) is used as the background strategy for optimization. Here features and cluster centers are encoded in the form of a string. As the objective functions, two internal cluster validity indices measuring the goodness of the obtained partitioning using Euclidean distance and point symmetry based distance, respectively, and a count on the number of features are utilized. These three objectives are optimized simultaneously using AMOSA in order to detect the appropriate subset of features, appropriate number of clusters as well as the appropriate partitioning. Points are allocated to different clusters using a point symmetry based distance. Mutation changes the feature combination as well as the set of cluster centers. Since AMOSA, like any other MOO technique, provides a set of solutions on the final Pareto front, a technique based on the concept of semi-supervised classification is developed to select a solution from the given set. The effectiveness of the proposed FeaClustMOO in comparison with other clustering techniques like its Euclidean distance based version where Euclidean distance is used for cluster assignment, a genetic algorithm based automatic clustering technique (VGAPS-clustering) using point symmetry based distance with all the features, K-means clustering technique with all features is shown for seven higher dimensional data sets obtained from real-life.     

A new feature selection method for Gaussian mixture clustering

With the wide applications of Gaussian mixture clustering, e.g., in semantic video classification [H. Luo, J. Fan, J. Xiao, X. Zhu, Semantic principal video shot classification via mixture Gaussian, in: Proceedings of the 2003 International Conference on Multimedia and Expo, vol. 2, 2003, pp. 189-192], it is a nontrivial task to select the useful features in Gaussian mixture clustering without class labels. This paper, therefore, proposes a new feature selection method, through which not only the most relevant features are identified, but the redundant features are also eliminated so that the smallest relevant feature subset can be found. We integrate this method with our recently proposed Gaussian mixture clustering approach, namely rival penalized expectation-maximization (RPEM) algorithm [Y.M. Cheung, A rival penalized EM algorithm towards maximizing weighted likelihood for density mixture clustering with automatic model selection, in: Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Pattern Recognition, 2004, pp. 633-636; Y.M. Cheung, Maximum weighted likelihood via rival penalized EM for density mixture clustering with automatic model selection, IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng. 17(6) (2005) 750-761], which is able to determine the number of components (i.e., the model order selection) in a Gaussian mixture automatically. Subsequently, the data clustering, model selection, and the feature selection are all performed in a single learning process. Experimental results have shown the efficacy of the proposed approach.     

A countably infinite mixture model for clustering and feature selection

Mixture modeling is one of the most useful tools in machine learning and data mining applications. An important challenge when applying finite mixture models is the selection of the number of clusters which best describes the data. Recent developments have shown that this problem can be handled by the application of non-parametric Bayesian techniques to mixture modeling. Another important crucial preprocessing step to mixture learning is the selection of the most relevant features. The main approach in this paper, to tackle these problems, consists on storing the knowledge in a generalized Dirichlet mixture model by applying non-parametric Bayesian estimation and inference techniques. Specifically, we extend finite generalized Dirichlet mixture models to the infinite case in which the number of components and relevant features do not need to be known a priori. This extension provides a natural representation of uncertainty regarding the challenging problem of model selection. We propose a Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm to learn the resulted infinite mixture. Through applications involving text and image categorization, we show that infinite mixture models offer a more powerful and robust performance than classic finite mixtures for both clustering and feature selection.     

Bayesian feature and model selection for Gaussian mixture models

We present a Bayesian method for mixture model training that simultaneously treats the feature selection and the model selection problem. The method is based on the integration of a mixture model formulation that takes into account the saliency of the features and a Bayesian approach to mixture learning that can be used to estimate the number of mixture components. The proposed learning algorithm follows the variational framework and can simultaneously optimize over the number of components, the saliency of the features, and the parameters of the mixture model. Experimental results using high-dimensional artificial and real data illustrate the effectiveness of the method.     

Discrete data clustering using finite mixture models

Finite mixture models have been applied for different computer vision, image processing and pattern recognition tasks. The majority of the work done concerning finite mixture models has focused on mixtures for continuous data. However, many applications involve and generate discrete data for which discrete mixtures are better suited. In this paper, we investigate the problem of discrete data modeling using finite mixture models. We propose a novel, well motivated mixture that we call the multinomial generalized Dirichlet mixture. The novel model is compared with other discrete mixtures. We designed experiments involving spatial color image databases modeling and summarization, and text classification to show the robustness, flexibility and merits of our approach.     

Simultaneous feature selection and Gaussian mixture model estimation for supervised classification problems

A new expectation maximization (EM) algorithm for time-critical supervised classification tasks in remote sensing is proposed. Compared to standard EM and other approaches, it has the following advantages: (1) No knowledge about the class distributions is needed. (2) The number of components is estimated. (3) It does not require careful initialization. (4) Singular estimates are avoided due to the ability of pruning components. (5) The best discriminating features are identified simultaneously. (6) The features are identified by incorporating Mahalanobis distances.     

Positive vectors clustering using inverted Dirichlet finite mixture models

In this work we present an unsupervised algorithm for learning finite mixture models from multivariate positive data. Indeed, this kind of data appears naturally in many applications, yet it has not been adequately addressed in the past. This mixture model is based on the inverted Dirichlet distribution, which offers a good representation and modeling of positive non-Gaussian data. The proposed approach for estimating the parameters of an inverted Dirichlet mixture is based on the maximum likelihood (ML) using Newton Raphson method. We also develop an approach, based on the minimum message length (MML) criterion, to select the optimal number of clusters to represent the data using such a mixture. Experimental results are presented using artificial histograms and real data sets. The challenging problem of software modules classification is investigated within the proposed statistical framework, also.     

Simultaneous feature selection and classification using kernel-penalized support vector machines

We introduce an embedded method that simultaneously selects relevant features during classifier construction by penalizing each feature’s use in the dual formulation of support vector machines (SVM). This approach called kernel-penalized SVM (KP-SVM) optimizes the shape of an anisotropic RBF Kernel eliminating features that have low relevance for the classifier. Additionally, KP-SVM employs an explicit stopping condition, avoiding the elimination of features that would negatively affect the classifier’s performance. We performed experiments on four real-world benchmark problems comparing our approach with well-known feature selection techniques. KP-SVM outperformed the alternative approaches and determined consistently fewer relevant features.     

Supervised feature selection by clustering using conditional mutual information-based distances

In this paper, a supervised feature selection approach is presented, which is based on metric applied on continuous and discrete data representations. This method builds a dissimilarity space using information theoretic measures, in particular conditional mutual information between features with respect to a relevant variable that represents the class labels. Applying a hierarchical clustering, the algorithm searches for a compression of the information contained in the original set of features. The proposed technique is compared with other state of art methods also based on information measures. Eventually, several experiments are presented to show the effectiveness of the features selected from the point of view of classification accuracy.     

一种基于特征聚类的特征选择方法

特征选择是数据挖掘和机器学习领域中一种常用的数据预处理技术。在无监督学习环境下,定义了一种特征平均相关度的度量方法,并在此基础上提出了一种基于特征聚类的特征选择方法 FSFC。该方法利用聚类算法在不同子空间中搜索簇群,使具有较强依赖关系（存在冗余性）的特征被划分到同一个簇群中,然后从每一个簇群中挑选具有代表性的子集共同构成特征子集,最终达到去除不相关特征和冗余特征的目的。在 UCI 数据集上的实验结果表明,FSFC 方法与几种经典的有监督特征选择方法具有相当的特征约减效果和分类性能。     

A finite mixture model for simultaneous high-dimensional clustering, localized feature selection and outlier rejection

Model-based approaches and in particular finite mixture models are widely used for data clustering which is a crucial step in several applications of practical importance. Indeed, many pattern recognition, computer vision and image processing applications can be approached as feature space clustering problems. For complex high-dimensional data, however, the use of these approaches presents several challenges such as the presence of many irrelevant features which may affect the speed and also compromise the accuracy of the used learning algorithm. Another problem is the presence of outliers which potentially influence the resulting model’s parameters. For this purpose, we propose and discuss an algorithm that partitions a given data set without a priori information about the number of clusters, the saliency of the features or the number of outliers. We illustrate the performance of our approach using different applications involving synthetic data, real data and objects shape clustering.     

Simultaneous feature selection and feature weighting using Hybrid Tabu Search/K-nearest neighbor classifier

Feature selection and feature weighting are useful techniques for improving the classification accuracy of K-nearest-neighbor (K-NN) rule. The term feature selection refers to algorithms that select the best subset of the input feature set. In feature weighting, each feature is multiplied by a weight value proportional to the ability of the feature to distinguish pattern classes. In this paper, a novel hybrid approach is proposed for simultaneous feature selection and feature weighting of K-NN rule based on Tabu Search (TS) heuristic. The proposed TS heuristic in combination with K-NN classifier is compared with several classifiers on various available data sets. The results have indicated a significant improvement in the performance in classification accuracy. The proposed TS heuristic is also compared with various feature selection algorithms. Experiments performed revealed that the proposed hybrid TS heuristic is superior to both simple TS and sequential search algorithms. We also present results for the classification of prostate cancer using multispectral images, an important problem in biomedicine.     

Unsupervised feature selection using clustering ensembles and population based incremental learning algorithm

This paper describes a novel feature selection algorithm for unsupervised clustering, that combines the clustering ensembles method and the population based incremental learning algorithm. The main idea of the proposed unsupervised feature selection algorithm is to search for a subset of all features such that the clustering algorithm trained on this feature subset can achieve the most similar clustering solution to the one obtained by an ensemble learning algorithm. In particular, a clustering solution is firstly achieved by a clustering ensembles method, then the population based incremental learning algorithm is adopted to find the feature subset that best fits the obtained clustering solution. One advantage of the proposed unsupervised feature selection algorithm is that it is dimensionality-unbiased. In addition, the proposed unsupervised feature selection algorithm leverages the consensus across multiple clustering solutions. Experimental results on several real data sets demonstrate that the proposed unsupervised feature selection algorithm is often able to obtain a better feature subset when compared with other existing unsupervised feature selection algorithms.     

基于特征聚类的封装特征选择算法

针对多维数据集,为得到一个最优特征子集,提出一种基于特征聚类的封装式特征选择算法。在初始阶段,利用三支决策理论动态地将原始特征集划分为若干特征子空间,通过特征聚类算法对每个特征子空间内的特征进行聚类;从每个特征类簇里挑选代表特征,利用邻域互信息对剩余特征进行降序排序并依次迭代选择,使用封装器评估该特征是否应该被选择,可得到一个具有最低分类错误率的最优特征子集。在UCI数据集上的实验结果表明,相较于其它特征选择算法,该算法能有效地提高各数据集在libSVM、J48、Nave Bayes以及KNN分类器上的分类准确率。     

基于特征选择的数据流聚类

在数据流聚类时,冗余特征会影响数据的聚类质量,移除冗余特征以提高聚类质量就显得尤为重要.为解决此问题,提出一种基于特征选择的数据流聚类算法(DSCFC).该算法应用了特征排序、特征等级评定、探测冗余不重要的特征、移除冗余特征算法等.实验结果表明,DSCFC算法能探测出数据流中隐含的冗余特征并移除冗余特征,在对有冗余特征的数据流聚类时,比CluSteam算法更有效,聚类质量更好.     

Conjugate mixture models for clustering multimodal data

The problem of multimodal clustering arises whenever the data are gathered with several physically different sensors. Observations from different modalities are not necessarily aligned in the sense there there is no obvious way to associate or compare them in some common space. A solution may consist in considering multiple clustering tasks independently for each modality. The main difficulty with such an approach is to guarantee that the unimodal clusterings are mutually consistent. In this letter, we show that multimodal clustering can be addressed within a novel framework: conjugate mixture models. These models exploit the explicit transformations that are often available between an unobserved parameter space (objects) and each of the observation spaces (sensors). We formulate the problem as a likelihood maximization task and derive the associated conjugate expectation-maximization algorithm. The convergence properties of the proposed algorithm are thoroughly investigated. Several local and global optimization techniques are proposed in order to increase its convergence speed. Two initialization strategies are proposed and compared. A consistent model selection criterion is proposed. The algorithm and its variants are tested and evaluated within the task of 3D localization of several speakers using both auditory and visual data.     

On online high-dimensional spherical data clustering and feature selection

Motivated by the high demand to construct compact and accurate statistical models that are automatically adjustable to dynamic changes, in this paper, we propose an online probabilistic framework for high-dimensional spherical data modeling. The proposed framework allows simultaneous clustering and feature selection in online settings using finite mixtures of von Mises distributions (movM). The unsupervised learning of the resulting model is approached using Expectation Maximization (EM) for parameter estimation along with minimum message length (MML) to determine the optimal number of mixture components. The gradient stochastic descent approach is considered for incremental updating of model parameters, also. Through empirical experiments, we demonstrate the merits of the proposed learning framework on diverse high dimensional datasets and challenging applications.     

Toward integrating feature selection algorithms for classification and clustering

This paper introduces concepts and algorithms of feature selection, surveys existing feature selection algorithms for classification and clustering, groups and compares different algorithms with a categorizing framework based on search strategies, evaluation criteria, and data mining tasks, reveals unattempted combinations, and provides guidelines in selecting feature selection algorithms. With the categorizing framework, we continue our efforts toward-building an integrated system for intelligent feature selection. A unifying platform is proposed as an intermediate step. An illustrative example is presented to show how existing feature selection algorithms can be integrated into a meta algorithm that can take advantage of individual algorithms. An added advantage of doing so is to help a user employ a suitable algorithm without knowing details of each algorithm. Some real-world applications are included to demonstrate the use of feature selection in data mining. We conclude this work by identifying trends and challenges of feature selection research and development.