Error-robust multi-view subspace clustering with nonconvex low-rank tensor approximation and hyper-Laplacian graph embedding

Abstract

Tensor based subspace clustering, a method aimed at partitioning multi-view data into distinct clusters through the tensor low-rank representation, has gained widespread popularity. Despite the effectiveness of tensor singular value decomposition (t-SVD) based nuclear norm in extracting high-dimensional information from multiple views, certain limitations persist. Firstly, while the commonly used l2,1 norm enhances clustering robustness, it remains susceptible to the impact of high-intensity noises. Secondly, the t-SVD based nuclear norm provides a biased estimation of tensor rank. Thirdly, existing methods either fail to preserve manifold structures from the original space or only extract binary relationships between data points. To address these challenges and enhance clustering performance in both high-intensity noisy and real-world conditions, an error-robust multi-view subspace clustering with nonconvex low-rank tensor approximation and hyper-Laplacian graph embedding (EMSC-NLTHG) method is proposed. Specifically, Cauchy loss function which reduces sensitivity to larger noises and outliers is introduced. Based on the Cauchy loss function, we develop the Cauchy pseudo norm to represent the reconstruction error in clustering to enhance the robustness. Moreover, rather than uniformly weighting all singular values in the t-SVD nuclear norm, a nonconvex tensor nuclear norm is adopted to add weights adaptively and approximate the true tensor rank. Additionally, hypergraph is embedded in the representation matrices to preserve local manifold structures and extract the complex multivariate relationships between data points. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed EMSC-NLTHG method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art techniques by approximately 18% to 40% on datasets corrupted by high-intensity noises and around 1% to 27% on eight real-world datasets across six popular evaluation metrics.