  Finding a small set of representatives from an unlabeled dataset is a core
problem in a broad range of applications such as dataset summarization and
information extraction. Classical exemplar selection methods such as
$k$-medoids work under the assumption that the data points are close to a few
cluster centroids, and cannot handle the case where data lie close to a union
of subspaces. This paper proposes a new exemplar selection model that searches
for a subset that best reconstructs all data points as measured by the $\ell_1$
norm of the representation coefficients. Geometrically, this subset best covers
all the data points as measured by the Minkowski functional of the subset. To
solve our model efficiently, we introduce a farthest first search algorithm
that iteratively selects the worst represented point as an exemplar. When the
dataset is drawn from a union of independent subspaces, our method is able to
select sufficiently many representatives from each subspace. We further develop
an exemplar based subspace clustering method that is robust to imbalanced data
and efficient for large scale data. Moreover, we show that a classifier trained
on the selected exemplars (when they are labeled) can correctly classify the
rest of the data points.
