  Subspace clustering refers to the problem of clustering unlabeled
high-dimensional data points into a union of low-dimensional linear subspaces,
assumed unknown. In practice one may have access to dimensionality-reduced
observations of the data only, resulting, e.g., from "undersampling" due to
complexity and speed constraints on the acquisition device. More pertinently,
even if one has access to the high-dimensional data set it is often desirable
to first project the data points into a lower-dimensional space and to perform
the clustering task there; this reduces storage requirements and computational
cost. The purpose of this paper is to quantify the impact of
dimensionality-reduction through random projection on the performance of the
sparse subspace clustering (SSC) and the thresholding based subspace clustering
(TSC) algorithms. We find that for both algorithms dimensionality reduction
down to the order of the subspace dimensions is possible without incurring
significant performance degradation. The mathematical engine behind our
theorems is a result quantifying how the affinities between subspaces change
under random dimensionality reducing projections.
