Pseudo-Label Guided Structural Discriminative Subspace Learning for Unsupervised Feature Selection

In this article, we propose a new unsupervised feature selection method named pseudo-label guided structural discriminative subspace learning (PSDSL). Unlike the previous methods that perform the two stages independently, it introduces the construction of probability graph into the feature selection learning process as a unified general framework, and therefore the probability graph can be learned adaptively. Moreover, we design a pseudo-label guided learning mechanism, and combine the graph-based method and the idea of maximizing the between-class scatter matrix with the trace ratio to construct an objective function that can improve the discrimination of the selected features. Besides, the main existing strategies of selecting features are to employ
$\ell_{2,1}$
-norm for feature selection, but this faces the challenges of sparsity limitations and parameter tuning. For addressing this issue, we employ the
$\ell_{2,0} $
-norm constraint on the learned subspace to ensure the row sparsity of the model and make the selected feature more stable. Effective optimization strategy is given to solve such NP-hard problem with the determination of parameters and complexity analysis in theory. Ultimately, extensive experiments conducted on nine real-world datasets and three biological ScRNA-seq genes datasets verify the effectiveness of the proposed method on the data clustering downstream task.