Consensus Guided Multi-View Clustering

In recent decades, tremendous emerging techniques thrive the artificial intelligence field due to the increasing collected data captured from multiple sensors. These multi-view data provide more rich information than traditional single-view data. Fusing heterogeneous information for certain tasks is a core part of multi-view learning, especially for multi-view clustering. Although numerous multi-view clustering algorithms have been proposed, most scholars focus on finding the common space of different views, but unfortunately ignore the benefits from partition level by ensemble clustering. For ensemble clustering, however, there is no interaction between individual partitions from each view and the final consensus one. To fill the gap, we propose a Consensus Guided Multi-View Clustering (CMVC) framework, which incorporates the generation of basic partitions from each view and fusion of consensus clustering in an interactive way, i.e., the consensus clustering guides the generation of basic partitions, and high quality basic partitions positively contribute to the consensus clustering as well. We design a non-trivial optimization solution to formulate CMVC into two iterative k-means clusterings by an approximate calculation. In addition, the generalization of CMVC provides a rich feasibility for different scenarios, and the extension of CMVC with incomplete multi-view clustering further validates the effectiveness for real-world applications. Extensive experiments demonstrate the advantages of CMVC over other widely used multi-view clustering methods in terms of cluster validity, and the robustness of CMVC to some important parameters and incomplete multi-view data.