Multi-view subspace clustering based on adaptive search

Abstract

Multi-view clustering has been widely applied to image classification, information retrieval, medical pathology analysis, and other fields. So far, many multi-view subspace clustering algorithms based on self-representation learning have been developed. However, most of them use the original data as a dictionary to construct affinity graphs, and their clustering performance depends largely on the quality of the original data features. If the raw data is corrupted by noise, directly using these noisy data as a self-representing dictionary may pose a series of research challenges. Secondly, in the process of self-representation learning, the internal relationship between data points is actually continuously updated and changed, and fixed data points not only affect the selection of view feature diversity, but also may lead to clustering results that are unusually sensitive to the input data. Finally, the coefficient matrix obtained by self-representation learning may contain noise or data structures that are not relevant to multi-view clustering. To remedy these shortcomings, this work proposes a new multi-view clustering algorithm, namely, multi-view subspace clustering based on adaptive search. Specifically, first, we find its similar data matrix for each view’s original data and perform dictionary learning by using the similar data matrix as a dictionary. This not only facilitates identifying the continuously varied internal relationships between data points, but also alleviates the errors that occur when the raw data is directly selected as a dictionary. Second, we introduce robust principal component analysis (RPCA) and rank constraints into the construction of affinity matrices to obtain cleaner and more robust affinity matrices that explore the same clustering properties among different views. In addition, we develop an augmented Lagrange multiplier (ALM) based method to solve the objective function of the model. Finally, we conducted substantial experiments on six real multi-view datasets to demonstrate that the MSC-AS algorithm is more robust and effective than some other advanced clustering algorithms.