Transfer Learning-Based Collaborative Multiview Clustering

Abstract

Collaborative multiview clustering methods can efficiently realize the view fusion by exploring complementary and consistent information among multiple views. However, these studies ignore all the differences between multiple views in fusion. In fact, in the multiview clustering, the data are diverse from view to view. The larger the difference between any two views is, the more the fusion of these views is required. Moreover, a global tradeoff parameter is generally adopted to restrain the penalty related to the disagreement of all views, which is often defined empirically. Inspired by the idea of transfer learning, a series of novel collaborative multiview clustering algorithms are proposed to tackle these challenges. In the most basic one, each view performs clustering independently and learns from others to improve its own clustering performance, in which a global learning factor is defined to control the interaction between multiple views. The fuzzy memberships are regarded as the important knowledge to provide guidance between views, and the consensus constraint is defined to ensure the consistent partitions of all views. In addition, the local adaptive learning factors between any two views instead of a global fixed one are adopted in an improved version to emphasize the difference between views, and the adjustment strategy for the learning factor is further designed to guarantee the stability of multiview clustering without the influence of initial values. Finally, to identify the significance of different views to the clustering, the extended versions are excavated with the assignment of view weights and the maximum entropy regularization technique is employed to optimize the weights. Experiments on various real-world multiview datasets verify the superiority of the presented approaches.