Unsupervised feature selection (UFS) has recently gained attention for its effectiveness in processing unlabeled high-dimensional data. However, existing methods overlook the intrinsic causal mechanisms within the data, resulting in the selection of irrelevant features and poor interpretability. Additionally, previous graph-based methods fail to account for the differing impacts of non-causal and causal features in constructing the similarity graph, which leads to false links in the generated graph. To address these issues, a novel UFS method, called Causally-Aware UnSupErvised Feature Selection learning (CAUSE-FS), is proposed. CAUSE-FS introduces a novel causal regularizer that reweights samples to balance the confounding distribution of each treatment feature. This regularizer is subsequently integrated into a generalized unsupervised spectral regression model to mitigate spurious associations between features and clustering labels, thus achieving causal feature selection. Furthermore, CAUSE-FS employs causality-guided hierarchical clustering to partition features with varying causal contributions into multiple granularities. By integrating similarity graphs learned adaptively at different granularities, CAUSE-FS increases the importance of causal features when constructing the fused similarity graph to capture the reliable local structure of data. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of CAUSE-FS over state-of-the-art methods, with its interpretability further validated through feature visualization.

Iterative feature space optimization involves systematically evaluating and adjusting the feature space to improve downstream task performance. However, existing works suffer from three key limitations:1) overlooking differences among data samples leads to evaluation bias; 2) tailoring feature spaces to specific machine learning models results in overfitting and poor generalization; 3) requiring the evaluator to be retrained from scratch during each optimization iteration significantly reduces the overall efficiency of the optimization process. To bridge these gaps, we propose a gEneralized Adaptive feature Space Evaluator (EASE) to efficiently produce optimal and generalized feature spaces. This framework consists of two key components: Feature-Sample Subspace Generator and Contextual Attention Evaluator. The first component aims to decouple the information distribution within the feature space to mitigate evaluation bias. To achieve this, we first identify features most relevant to prediction tasks and samples most challenging for evaluation based on feedback from the subsequent evaluator. This decoupling strategy makes the evaluator consistently target the most challenging aspects of the feature space. The second component intends to incrementally capture evolving patterns of the feature space for efficient evaluation. We propose a weighted-sharing multi-head attention mechanism to encode key characteristics of the feature space into an embedding vector for evaluation. Moreover, the evaluator is updated incrementally, retaining prior evaluation knowledge while incorporating new insights, as consecutive feature spaces during the optimization process share partial information. Extensive experiments on fourteen real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Our code and data are publicly available.

Tabular data is one of the most widely used formats across industries, driving critical applications in areas such as finance, healthcare, and marketing. In the era of data-centric AI, improving data quality and representation has become essential for enhancing model performance, particularly in applications centered around tabular data. This survey examines the key aspects of tabular data-centric AI, emphasizing feature selection and feature generation as essential techniques for data space refinement. We provide a systematic review of feature selection methods, which identify and retain the most relevant data attributes, and feature generation approaches, which create new features to simplify the capture of complex data patterns. This survey offers a comprehensive overview of current methodologies through an analysis of recent advancements, practical applications, and the strengths and limitations of these techniques. Finally, we outline open challenges and suggest future perspectives to inspire continued innovation in this field.

The objective of multi-view unsupervised feature and instance co-selection is to simultaneously iden-tify the most representative features and samples from multi-view unlabeled data, which aids in mit-igating the curse of dimensionality and reducing instance size to improve the performance of down-stream tasks. However, existing methods treat feature selection and instance selection as two separate processes, failing to leverage the potential interactions between the feature and instance spaces. Addi-tionally, previous co-selection methods for multi-view data require concatenating different views, which overlooks the consistent information among them. In this paper, we propose a CONsistency and DivErsity learNing-based multi-view unsupervised Feature and Instance co-selection (CONDEN-FI) to address the above-mentioned issues. Specifically, CONDEN-FI reconstructs mul-ti-view data from both the sample and feature spaces to learn representations that are consistent across views and specific to each view, enabling the simultaneous selection of the most important features and instances. Moreover, CONDEN-FI adaptively learns a view-consensus similarity graph to help select both dissimilar and similar samples in the reconstructed data space, leading to a more diverse selection of instances. An efficient algorithm is developed to solve the resultant optimization problem, and the comprehensive experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate that CONDEN-FI is effective compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Semi-supervised multi-label feature selection has recently been developed to solve the curse of dimensionality problem in high-dimensional multi-label data with certain samples missing labels. Although many efforts have been made, most existing methods use a predefined graph approach to capture the sample similarity or the label correlation. In this manner, the presence of noise and outliers within the original feature space can undermine the reliability of the resulting sample similarity graph. It also fails to precisely depict the label correlation due to the existence of unknown labels. Besides, these methods only consider the discriminative power of selected features, while neglecting their redundancy. In this paper, we propose an Adaptive Collaborative Correlation lEarning-based Semi-Supervised Multi-label Feature Selection (Access-MFS) method to address these issues. Specifically, a generalized regression model equipped with an extended uncorrelated constraint is introduced to select discriminative yet irrelevant features and maintain consistency between predicted and ground-truth labels in labeled data, simultaneously. Then, the instance correlation and label correlation are integrated into the proposed regression model to adaptively learn both the sample similarity graph and the label similarity graph, which mutually enhance feature selection performance. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed Access-MFS over other state-of-the-art methods.

Although multi-view unsupervised feature selection (MUFS) is an effective technology for reducing dimensionality in machine learning, existing methods cannot directly deal with incomplete multi-view data where some samples are missing in certain views. These methods should first apply predetermined values to impute missing data, then perform feature selection on the complete dataset. Separating imputation and feature selection processes fails to capitalize on the potential synergy where local structural information gleaned from feature selection could guide the imputation, thereby improving the feature selection performance in turn. Additionally, previous methods only focus on leveraging samples' local structure information, while ignoring the intrinsic locality of the feature space. To tackle these problems, a novel MUFS method, called UNified view Imputation and Feature selectIon lEaRning (UNIFIER), is proposed. UNIFIER explores the local structure of multi-view data by adaptively learning similarity-induced graphs from both the sample and feature spaces. Then, UNIFIER dynamically recovers the missing views, guided by the sample and feature similarity graphs during the feature selection procedure. Furthermore, the half-quadratic minimization technique is used to automatically weight different instances, alleviating the impact of outliers and unreliable restored data. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that UNIFIER outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.

Multi-view unsupervised feature selection has been proven to be efficient in reducing the dimensionality of multi-view unlabeled data with high dimensions. The previous methods assume all of the views are complete. However, in real applications, the multi-view data are often incomplete, i.e., some views of instances are missing, which will result in the failure of these methods. Besides, while the data arrive in form of streams, these existing methods will suffer the issues of high storage cost and expensive computation time. To address these issues, we propose an Incremental Incomplete Multi-view Unsupervised Feature Selection method (I$^2$MUFS) on incomplete multi-view streaming data. By jointly considering the consistent and complementary information across different views, I$^2$MUFS embeds the unsupervised feature selection into an extended weighted non-negative matrix factorization model, which can learn a consensus clustering indicator matrix and fuse different latent feature matrices with adaptive view weights. Furthermore, we introduce the incremental leaning mechanisms to develop an alternative iterative algorithm, where the feature selection matrix is incrementally updated, rather than recomputing on the entire updated data from scratch. A series of experiments are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method by comparing with several state-of-the-art methods. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method in terms of the clustering metrics and the computational cost.

Fusion technique is a key research topic in multimodal sentiment analysis. The recent attention-based fusion demonstrates advances over simple operation-based fusion. However, these fusion works adopt single-scale, i.e., token-level or utterance-level, unimodal representation. Such single-scale fusion is suboptimal because that different modality should be aligned with different granularities. This paper proposes a fusion model named ScaleVLAD to gather multi-Scale representation from text, video, and audio with shared Vectors of Locally Aggregated Descriptors to improve unaligned multimodal sentiment analysis. These shared vectors can be regarded as shared topics to align different modalities. In addition, we propose a self-supervised shifted clustering loss to keep the fused feature differentiation among samples. The backbones are three Transformer encoders corresponding to three modalities, and the aggregated features generated from the fusion module are feed to a Transformer plus a full connection to finish task predictions. Experiments on three popular sentiment analysis benchmarks, IEMOCAP, MOSI, and MOSEI, demonstrate significant gains over baselines.

Unsupervised feature selection is an important method to reduce dimensions of high dimensional data without labels, which is benefit to avoid ``curse of dimensionality'' and improve the performance of subsequent machine learning tasks, like clustering and retrieval. How to select the uncorrelated and discriminative features is the key problem of unsupervised feature selection. Many proposed methods select features with strong discriminant and high redundancy, or vice versa. However, they only satisfy one of these two criteria. Other existing methods choose the discriminative features with low redundancy by constructing the graph matrix on the original feature space. Since the original feature space usually contains redundancy and noise, it will degrade the performance of feature selection. In order to address these issues, we first present a novel generalized regression model imposed by an uncorrelated constraint and the $\ell_{2,1}$-norm regularization. It can simultaneously select the uncorrelated and discriminative features as well as reduce the variance of these data points belonging to the same neighborhood, which is help for the clustering task. Furthermore, the local intrinsic structure of data is constructed on the reduced dimensional space by learning the similarity-induced graph adaptively. Then the learnings of the graph structure and the indicator matrix based on the spectral analysis are integrated into the generalized regression model. Finally, we develop an alternative iterative optimization algorithm to solve the objective function. A series of experiments are carried out on nine real-world data sets to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in comparison with other competing approaches.