Integrating Feature and Graph Learning with Factorization Models for Low-Rank Data Representation

Author

Chong Peng, Southern Illinois University CarbondaleFollow

Date of Award

12-1-2017

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department

Computer Science

First Advisor

Carver, Norman

Second Advisor

Cheng, Qiang

Abstract

Representing and handling high-dimensional data has been increasingly ubiquitous in many real world-applications, such as computer vision, machine learning, and data mining. High-dimensional data usually have intrinsic low-dimensional structures, which are suitable for subsequent data processing. As a consequent, it has been a common demand to find low-dimensional data representations in many machine learning and data mining problems. Factorization methods have been impressive in recovering intrinsic low-dimensional structures of the data. When seeking low-dimensional representation of the data, traditional methods mainly face two challenges: 1) how to discover the most variational features/information from the data; 2) how to measure accurate nonlinear relationships of the data. As a solution to these challenges, traditional methods usually make use of a two-step approach by performing feature selection and manifold construction followed by further data processing, which omits the dependence between these learning tasks and produce inaccurate data representation. To resolve these problems, we propose to integrate feature learning and graph learning with factorization model, which allows the goals of learning features, constructing manifold, and seeking new data representation to mutually enhance and lead to powerful data representation capability. Moreover, it has been increasingly common that 2-dimensional (2D) data often have high dimensions of features, where each example of 2D data is a matrix with its elements being features. For such data, traditional data usually convert them to 1-dimensional vectorial data before data processing, which severely damages inherent structures of such data. We propose to directly use 2D data for seeking new representation, which enables the model to preserve inherent 2D structures of the data. We propose to seek projection directions to find the subspaces, in which spatial information is maximumly preserved. Also, manifold and new data representation are learned in these subspaces, such that the manifold are clean and the new representation is discriminative. Consequently, seeking projections, learning manifold and constructing new representation mutually enhance and lead to powerful data representation technique.