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Most of the current unsupervised feature selection methods are designed to process only numerical datasets. Therefore, in practical problems, where the objects under study are described through both numerical and non-numerical features (mixed datasets), these methods cannot be directly applied. In this work, we propose a new unsupervised filter feature selection method that can be used on datasets with both numerical and non-numerical features. The proposed method is inspired by the spectral feature selection, by using together a kernel and a new spectrum based feature evaluation measure for quantifying the feature relevance. Experiments on synthetic datasets show that in the 99% of the cases where the relevant features are known our method identifies and ranks the most relevant features at the beginning of a sorted list. Additionally, we contrast our method against state-of-the-art unsupervised filter methods over real datasets, and our method in most cases significantly outperforms them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Most clustering algorithms organize a collection of objects into a set of disjoint clusters. Although this approach has been successfully applied in unsupervised learning, there are several applications where objects could belong to more than one cluster. Overlapping clustering is an alternative in those contexts like social network analysis, information retrieval and bioinformatics, among other problems where non-disjoint clusters appear. In addition, there are environments where the collection changes frequently and the clustering must be updated; however, most of the existing overlapping clustering algorithms are not able to efficiently update the clustering. In this paper, we introduce a new overlapping clustering algorithm, called DClustR, which is based on the graph theory approach and it introduces a new strategy for building more accurate overlapping clusters than those built by state-of-the-art algorithms. Moreover, our algorithm introduces a new strategy for efficiently updating the clustering when the collection changes. The experimentation conducted over several standard collections shows the good performance of the proposed algorithm, wrt. accuracy and efficiency. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In this paper, we introduce an efficient algorithm for mining discriminative regularities on databases with mixed and incomplete data. Unlike previous methods, our algorithm does not apply an a priori discretization on numerical features; it extracts regularities from a set of diverse decision trees, induced with a special procedure. Experimental results show that a classifier based on the regularities obtained by our algorithm attains higher classification accuracy, using fewer discriminative regularities than those obtained by previous pattern-based classifiers. Additionally, we show that our classifier is competitive with traditional and state-of-the-art classifiers. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]