Enhancing the stability and efficiency of spectral ordering with partial supervision and feature selection

TLDR: This work proposes a novel semi-supervised spectral ordering algorithm that modifies the Laplacian matrix such that domain knowledge is taken into account and demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed framework on the seriation of Usenet newsgroup messages.

Abstract: Several studies have demonstrated the prospects of spectral ordering for data mining. One successful application is seriation of paleontological findings, i.e. ordering the sites of excavation, using data on mammal co-occurrences only. However, spectral ordering ignores the background knowledge that is naturally present in the domain: paleontologists can derive the ages of the sites within some accuracy. On the other hand, the age information is uncertain, so the best approach would be to combine the background knowledge with the information on mammal co-occurrences. Motivated by this kind of partial supervision we propose a novel semi-supervised spectral ordering algorithm that modifies the Laplacian matrix such that domain knowledge is taken into account. Also, it performs feature selection by discarding features that contribute most to the unwanted variability of the data in bootstrap sampling. Moreover, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework on the seriation of Usenet newsgroup messages, where the task is to find out the underlying flow of discussion. The theoretical properties of our algorithm are thoroughly analyzed and it is demonstrated that the proposed framework enhances the stability of the spectral ordering output and induces computational gains.