  In the era of big data, it is becoming common to have data with multiple
modalities or coming from multiple sources, known as "multi-view data".
Multi-view data are usually unlabeled and come from high-dimensional spaces
(such as language vocabularies), unsupervised multi-view feature selection is
crucial to many applications. However, it is nontrivial due to the following
challenges. First, there are too many instances or the feature dimensionality
is too large. Thus, the data may not fit in memory. How to select useful
features with limited memory space? Second, how to select features from
streaming data and handles the concept drift? Third, how to leverage the
consistent and complementary information from different views to improve the
feature selection in the situation when the data are too big or come in as
streams? To the best of our knowledge, none of the previous works can solve all
the challenges simultaneously. In this paper, we propose an Online unsupervised
Multi-View Feature Selection, OMVFS, which deals with large-scale/streaming
multi-view data in an online fashion. OMVFS embeds unsupervised feature
selection into a clustering algorithm via NMF with sparse learning. It further
incorporates the graph regularization to preserve the local structure
information and help select discriminative features. Instead of storing all the
historical data, OMVFS processes the multi-view data chunk by chunk and
aggregates all the necessary information into several small matrices. By using
the buffering technique, the proposed OMVFS can reduce the computational and
storage cost while taking advantage of the structure information. Furthermore,
OMVFS can capture the concept drifts in the data streams. Extensive experiments
on four real-world datasets show the effectiveness and efficiency of the
proposed OMVFS method. More importantly, OMVFS is about 100 times faster than
the off-line methods.
