Suppose certain data points are overly contaminated, then the existing principal component analysis (PCA) methods are frequently incapable of filtering out and eliminating the excessively polluted ones, which potentially lead to the functional degeneration of the corresponding models. To tackle the issue, we propose a general framework namely robust weight learning with adaptive neighbors (RWL-AN), via which adaptive weight vector is automatically obtained with both robustness and sparse neighbors. More significantly, the degree of the sparsity is steerable such that only exact k well-fitting samples with least reconstruction errors are activated during the optimization, while the residual samples, i.e., the extreme noised ones are eliminated for the global robustness. Additionally, the framework is further applied to PCA problem to demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of the proposed RWL-AN model.

In reality, the presence of outliers in data largely reduces the performance of PCA approaches.

Update: Thanks for the feedback and I have read them. Yet I don't think it has convinced me to change my decision. For Q2, if the framework is general, the authors should have extended it more than one case. Otherwise, the authors should focus on PCA instead of claiming the framework to be general. For Q3 and Q4, I think the discussion on how to choose k and d is not sufficient in the paper.

The reviews were mixed, but given the competitive nature of the conference, this paper probably doesn't make the threshold. Since the paper deals with adaptive dimensionality reduction, the following paper seems quite relevant: Lee-Ad Gottlieb, Aryeh Kontorovich, Robert Krauthgamer: Adaptive metric dimensionality reduction.

Suppose certain data points are overly contaminated, then the existing principal component analysis (PCA) methods are frequently incapable of filtering out and eliminating the excessively polluted ones, which potentially lead to the functional degeneration of the corresponding models. To tackle the issue, we propose a general framework namely robust weight learning with adaptive neighbors (RWL-AN), via which adaptive weight vector is automatically obtained with both robustness and sparse neighbors. More significantly, the degree of the sparsity is steerable such that only exact k well-fitting samples with least reconstruction errors are activated during the optimization, while the residual samples, i.e., the extreme noised ones are eliminated for the global robustness. Additionally, the framework is further applied to PCA problem to demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of the proposed RWL-AN model.

Suppose certain data points are overly contaminated, then the existing principal component analysis (PCA) methods are frequently incapable of filtering out and eliminating the excessively polluted ones, which potentially lead to the functional degeneration of the corresponding models. To tackle the issue, we propose a general framework namely robust weight learning with adaptive neighbors (RWL-AN), via which adaptive weight vector is automatically obtained with both robustness and sparse neighbors. More significantly, the degree of the sparsity is steerable such that only exact k well-fitting samples with least reconstruction errors are activated during the optimization, while the residual samples, i.e., the extreme noised ones are eliminated for the global robustness. Additionally, the framework is further applied to PCA problem to demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of the proposed RWL-AN model. Papers published at the Neural Information Processing Systems Conference.

Dimensionality reduction is an important operation in information visualization, feature extraction, clustering, regression, and classification, especially for processing noisy high dimensional data. However, most existing approaches preserve either the global or the local structure of the data, but not both. Approaches that preserve only the global data structure, such as principal component analysis (PCA), are usually sensitive to outliers. Approaches that preserve only the local data structure, such as locality preserving projections, are usually unsupervised (and hence cannot use label information) and uses a fixed similarity graph. We propose a novel linear dimensionality reduction approach, supervised discriminative sparse PCA with adaptive neighbors (SDSPCAAN), to integrate neighborhood-free supervised discriminative sparse PCA and projected clustering with adaptive neighbors. As a result, both global and local data structures, as well as the label information, are used for better dimensionality reduction. Classification experiments on nine high-dimensional datasets validated the effectiveness and robustness of our proposed SDSPCAAN.

Retrieving the most similar objects in a large-scale database for a given query is a fundamental building block in many application domains, ranging from web searches, visual, cross media, and document retrievals. State-of-the-art approaches have mainly focused on capturing the underlying geometry of the data manifolds. Graph-based approaches, in particular, define various diffusion processes on weighted data graphs. Despite success, these approaches rely on fixed-weight graphs, making ranking sensitive to the input affinity matrix. In this study, we propose a new ranking algorithm that simultaneously learns the data affinity matrix and the ranking scores. The proposed optimization formulation assigns adaptive neighbors to each point in the data based on the local connectivity, and the smoothness constraint assigns similar ranking scores to similar data points. We develop a novel and efficient algorithm to solve the optimization problem. Evaluations using synthetic and real datasets suggest that the proposed algorithm can outperform the existing methods.