Unsupervised Feature Selection Through Group Discovery

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Lifshitz, Shira, Lindenbaum, Ofir, Mishne, Gal, Meir, Ron, Benisty, Hadas
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Lifshitz, Shira
Lindenbaum, Ofir
Mishne, Gal
Meir, Ron
Benisty, Hadas
author_facet Lifshitz, Shira
Lindenbaum, Ofir
Mishne, Gal
Meir, Ron
Benisty, Hadas
contents Unsupervised feature selection (FS) is essential for high-dimensional learning tasks where labels are not available. It helps reduce noise, improve generalization, and enhance interpretability. However, most existing unsupervised FS methods evaluate features in isolation, even though informative signals often emerge from groups of related features. For example, adjacent pixels, functionally connected brain regions, or correlated financial indicators tend to act together, making independent evaluation suboptimal. Although some methods attempt to capture group structure, they typically rely on predefined partitions or label supervision, limiting their applicability. We propose GroupFS, an end-to-end, fully differentiable framework that jointly discovers latent feature groups and selects the most informative groups among them, without relying on fixed a priori groups or label supervision. GroupFS enforces Laplacian smoothness on both feature and sample graphs and applies a group sparsity regularizer to learn a compact, structured representation. Across nine benchmarks spanning images, tabular data, and biological datasets, GroupFS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised FS in clustering and selects groups of features that align with meaningful patterns.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_09166
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Unsupervised Feature Selection Through Group Discovery
Lifshitz, Shira
Lindenbaum, Ofir
Mishne, Gal
Meir, Ron
Benisty, Hadas
Machine Learning
Unsupervised feature selection (FS) is essential for high-dimensional learning tasks where labels are not available. It helps reduce noise, improve generalization, and enhance interpretability. However, most existing unsupervised FS methods evaluate features in isolation, even though informative signals often emerge from groups of related features. For example, adjacent pixels, functionally connected brain regions, or correlated financial indicators tend to act together, making independent evaluation suboptimal. Although some methods attempt to capture group structure, they typically rely on predefined partitions or label supervision, limiting their applicability. We propose GroupFS, an end-to-end, fully differentiable framework that jointly discovers latent feature groups and selects the most informative groups among them, without relying on fixed a priori groups or label supervision. GroupFS enforces Laplacian smoothness on both feature and sample graphs and applies a group sparsity regularizer to learn a compact, structured representation. Across nine benchmarks spanning images, tabular data, and biological datasets, GroupFS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised FS in clustering and selects groups of features that align with meaningful patterns.
title Unsupervised Feature Selection Through Group Discovery
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09166