Subspace segmentation or subspace learning is a challenging and complicated task in machine learning. This paper builds a primary frame and solid theoretical bases for the minimal subspace segmentation (MSS) of finite samples. Existence and conditional uniqueness of MSS are discussed with conditions generally satisfied in applications. Utilizing weak prior information of MSS, the minimality inspection of segments is further simplified to the prior detection of partitions. The MSS problem is then modeled as a computable optimization problem via self-expressiveness of samples. A closed form of representation matrices is first given for the self-expressiveness, and the connection of diagonal blocks is then addressed. The MSS model uses a rank restriction on the sum of segment ranks. Theoretically, it can retrieve the minimal sample subspaces that could be heavily intersected. The optimization problem is solved via a basic manifold conjugate gradient algorithm, alternative optimization and hybrid optimization, taking into account of solving both the primal MSS problem and its pseudo-dual problem. The MSS model is further modified for handling noisy data, and solved by an ADMM algorithm. The reported experiments show the strong ability of the MSS method on retrieving minimal sample subspaces that are heavily intersected.
For the SSC, @cite_15 showed that if the samples are uniformly distributed in a union of subspaces @math and for the basis matrices @math of @math , @math with where @math is a give parameter, then SSC could give a block-diagonal solution partitioned as the ideal subspace segmentation with a probability approximately equal to one, depending on @math , @math , @math , and @math . We remark this claim does not imply a connected solution as we have explained in the early discussion or mentioned by @cite_3 .
@cite_15 @cite_3
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This paper studies the subspace segmentation problem. Given a set of data points drawn from a union of subspaces, the goal is to partition them into their underlying subspaces they were drawn from. The spectral clustering method is used as the framework. It requires to find an affinity matrix which is close to block diagonal, with nonzero entries corresponding to the data point pairs from the same subspace. In this work, we argue that both sparsity and the grouping effect are important for subspace segmentation. A sparse affinity matrix tends to be block diagonal, with less connections between data points from different subspaces. The grouping effect ensures that the highly corrected data which are usually from the same subspace can be grouped together. Sparse Subspace Clustering (SSC), by using l1-minimization, encourages sparsity for data selection, but it lacks of the grouping effect. On the contrary, Low-Rank Representation (LRR), by rank minimization, and Least Squares Regression (LSR), by l2-regularization, exhibit strong grouping effect, but they are short in subset selection. Thus the obtained affinity matrix is usually very sparse by SSC, yet very dense by LRR and LSR. In this work, we propose the Correlation Adaptive Subspace Segmentation (CASS) method by using trace Lasso. CASS is a data correlation dependent method which simultaneously performs automatic data selection and groups correlated data together. It can be regarded as a method which adaptively balances SSC and LSR. Both theoretical and experimental results show the effectiveness of CASS. Sparse Subspace Clustering (SSC) is one of the recent approaches to subspace segmentation. In SSC a graph is constructed whose nodes are the data points and whose edges are inferred from the L1-sparse representation of each point by the others. It has been proved that if the points lie on a mixture of independent subspaces, the graphical structure of each subspace is disconnected from the others. However, the problem of connectivity within each subspace is still unanswered. This is important since the subspace segmentation in SSC is based on finding the connected components of the graph. Our analysis is built upon the connection between the sparse representation through L1-norm minimization and the geometry of convex poly-topes proposed by the compressed sensing community. After introduction of some assumptions to make the problem well-defined, it is proved that the connectivity within each subspace holds for 2- and 3-dimensional subspaces. The claim of connectivity for general d-dimensional case, even for generic configurations, is proved false by giving a counterexample in dimensions greater than 3. This paper considers the problem of subspace clustering under noise. Specifically, we study the behavior of Sparse Subspace Clustering (SSC) when either adversarial or random noise is added to the unlabelled input data points, which are assumed to lie in a union of low-dimensional subspaces. We show that a modified version of SSC is provably effective in correctly identifying the underlying subspaces, even with noisy data. This extends theoretical guarantee of this algorithm to the practical setting and provides justification to the success of SSC in a class of real applications. This paper considers the problem of subspace clustering under noise. Specifically, we study the behavior of Sparse Subspace Clustering (SSC) when either adversarial or random noise is added to the unlabeled input data points, which are assumed to be in a union of low-dimensional subspaces. We show that a modified version of SSC is provably effective in correctly identifying the underlying subspaces, even with noisy data. This extends theoretical guarantee of this algorithm to more practical settings and provides justification to the success of SSC in a class of real applications.