Self-paced Consensus Clustering with Bipartite Graph

Consensus clustering provides a framework to ensemble multiple clustering results to obtain a consensus and robust result. Most existing consensus clustering methods usually apply all data to ensemble learning, whereas ignoring the side effects caused by some difficult or unreliable instances. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel selfpaced consensus clustering method to gradually involve instances from more reliable to less reliable ones into the ensemble learning. We first construct an initial bipartite graph from the multiple base clustering results, where the nodes represent the instances and clusters and the edges indicate that an instance belongs to a cluster. Then, we learn a structured bipartite graph from the initial one by self-paced learning, i.e., we automatically decide the reliability of each edge and involves the edges into graph learning in order of their reliability. At last, we obtain the final consensus clustering result from the learned bipartite graph. The extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method.