Oracle Based Active Set Algorithm for Scalable Elastic Net Subspace Clustering

State-of-the-art subspace clustering methods are based on expressing each data point as a linear combination of other data points while regularizing the matrix of coefficients with $\ell1$, $\ell2$ or nuclear norms. $\ell1$ regularization is guaranteed to give a subspace-preserving affinity (i.e., there are no connections between points from different subspaces) under broad theoretical conditions, but the clusters may not be connected. $\ell2$ and nuclear norm regularization often improve connectivity, but give a subspace-preserving affinity only for independent subspaces. Mixed $\ell1$, $\ell2$ and nuclear norm regularizations offer a balance between the subspace-preserving and connectedness properties, but this comes at the cost of increased computational complexity. This paper studies the geometry of the elastic net regularizer (a mixture of the $\ell1$ and $\ell2$ norms) and uses it to derive a provably correct and scalable active set method for finding the optimal coefficients. Our geometric analysis also provides a theoretical justification and a geometric interpretation for the balance between the connectedness (due to $\ell2$ regularization) and subspace-preserving (due to $\ell1$ regularization) properties for elastic net subspace clustering. Our experiments show that the proposed active set method not only achieves state-of-the-art clustering performance, but also efficiently handles large-scale datasets.