Adaptive sparse graph learning based dimensionality reduction for classification

Abstract To preserve the sparsity structure in dimensionality reduction, sparsity preserving projection (SPP) is widely used in many fields of classification, which has the advantages of noise robustness and data adaptivity compared with other graph based method. However, the sparsity parameter of SPP is fixed for all samples without any adjustment. In this paper, an improved SPP method is proposed, which has an adaptive parameter adjustment strategy during sparse graph construction. With this adjustment strategy, the sparsity parameter of each sample is adjusted adaptively according to the relationship of those samples with nonzero sparse representation coefficients, by which the discriminant information of graph is enhanced. With the same expectation, similarity information both in original space and projection space is applied for sparse representation as guidance information. Besides, a new measurement is introduced to control the influence of each sample’s local structure on projection learning, by which more correct discriminant information should be preserved in the projection space. With the contributions of above strategies, the low-dimensional space with high discriminant ability is found, which is more beneficial for classification. Experimental results on three datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach can achieve better classification performance over some available state-of-the-art approaches.