Incomplete multi-view clustering via kernelized graph learning

Abstract

A fundamental assumption underpinning the recent progress in multi-view clustering is the full observation of all views, which rarely holds for real-world data as they often suffer from the absence of some instances in individual views. Such incompleteness generally disables the traditional multi-view clustering models in practical applications. This paper proposes a Kernelized Graph-based Incomplete Multi-view Clustering (KGIMC) algorithm to overcome this limitation. The key novelty of our model is that its subtasks, e.g. similarity learning, clustering analysis, and kernel completion, are optimized in a mutual reinforcement manner to achieve an overall optimal clustering result as follows: 1) Similarity learning is directed by clustering analysis to construct a graph with as many connected components just as the number of clusters. 2) The well-constructed similarity graph in the last iteration is employed to guide the process of kernel completion. 3) The updated kernels are in turn used to conduct subsequent similarity learning. We extend our model into multi-kernel settings to alleviate the difficulty of kernel selection. We provide an alternating iterative algorithm to solve KGIMC with convergence guaranteed and complexity analyzed. Extensive experiments are conducted on several popular datasets, and the results demonstrate that KGIMC outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches in general.