  This paper aims at constructing a good graph for discovering intrinsic data
structures in a semi-supervised learning setting. Firstly, we propose to build
a non-negative low-rank and sparse (referred to as NNLRS) graph for the given
data representation. Specifically, the weights of edges in the graph are
obtained by seeking a nonnegative low-rank and sparse matrix that represents
each data sample as a linear combination of others. The so-obtained NNLRS-graph
can capture both the global mixture of subspaces structure (by the low
rankness) and the locally linear structure (by the sparseness) of the data,
hence is both generative and discriminative. Secondly, as good features are
extremely important for constructing a good graph, we propose to learn the data
embedding matrix and construct the graph jointly within one framework, which is
termed as NNLRS with embedded features (referred to as NNLRS-EF). Extensive
experiments on three publicly available datasets demonstrate that the proposed
method outperforms the state-of-the-art graph construction method by a large
margin for both semi-supervised classification and discriminative analysis,
which verifies the effectiveness of our proposed method.
