Anchor-based multi-view graph clustering has recently gained popularity as an effective approach for clustering data with multiple views. However, existing methods have limitations in terms of handling inconsistent information and noise across views, resulting in an unreliable consensus representation. In addition, post-processing is needed to obtain final results after anchor graph construction, which negatively affects clustering performance. In this article, we propose a Robust and Consistent Anchor Graph Learning method (RCAGL) for multi-view clustering to address these challenges. RCAGL constructs a consistent anchor graph that captures inter-view commonality and filters out view-specific noise by learning a consistent part and a view-specific part simultaneously. A $k$ -connectivity constraint is imposed on the consistent anchor graph, leading to a clear graph structure and direct generation of cluster labels without additional post-processing. Experimental results on several benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of RCAGL in terms of clustering accuracy, scalability to large-scale data, and robustness to view-specific noise, outperforming advanced multi-view clustering methods.
Benefiting from the strong view-consistent information mining capacity, multi-view contrastive clustering has attracted plenty of attention in recent years. However, we observe the following drawback, which limits the clustering performance from further improvement. The existing multi-view models mainly focus on the consistency of the same samples in different views while ignoring the circumstance of similar but different samples in cross-view scenarios. To solve this problem, we propose a novel Dual contrastive calibration network for Multi-View Clustering (DealMVC). Specifically, we first design a fusion mechanism to obtain a global cross-view feature. Then, a global contrastive calibration loss is proposed by aligning the view feature similarity graph and the high-confidence pseudo-label graph. Moreover, to utilize the diversity of multi-view information, we propose a local contrastive calibration loss to constrain the consistency of pair-wise view features. The feature structure is regularized by reliable class information, thus guaranteeing similar samples have similar features in different views. During the training procedure, the interacted cross-view feature is jointly optimized at both local and global levels. In comparison with other state-of-the-art approaches, the comprehensive experimental results obtained from eight benchmark datasets provide substantial validation of the effectiveness and superiority of our algorithm. We release the code of DealMVC at https://github.com/xihongyang1999/DealMVC on GitHub.
12 December 2022 in IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems
Multi-view clustering (MVC) methods aim to exploit consistent and complementary information among each view and achieve encouraging performance improvement than single-view counterparts. In practical applications, it is common to obtain instances with partially available information, raising researches of incomplete multi-view clustering (IMC) issues. Recently, several fast IMC methods have been proposed to process the large-scale partial data. Though with considerable acceleration, these methods seek view-shared anchors and ignore specific information among single views. To tackle the above issue, we propose a fast IMC with view-independent anchors (FIMVC-VIA) method in this article. Specifically, we learn individual anchors based on the diversity of distribution among each incomplete view and construct a unified anchor graph following the principle of consistent clustering structure. By constructing an anchor graph instead of pairwise full graph, the time and space complexities of our proposed FIMVC-VIA are proven to be linearly related to the number of samples, which can efficiently solve the large-scale task. The experiment performed on benchmarks with different missing rate illustrates the improvement in complexity and effectiveness of our method compared with other IMC methods. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Tracesource/ FIMVC-VIA.
21 August 2024 in IEEE Transactions on Image Processing
Anchor graph has been recently proposed to accelerate multi-view graph clustering and widely applied in various large-scale applications. Different from capturing full instance relationships, these methods choose small portion anchors among each view, construct single-view anchor graphs and combine them into the unified graph. Despite its efficiency, we observe that: (i) Existing mechanism adopts a separable two-step procedure-anchor graph construction and individual graph fusion, which may degrade the clustering performance. (ii)These methods determine the number of selected anchors to be equal among all the views, which may destruct the data distribution diversity. A more flexible multi-view anchor graph fusion framework with diverse magnitudes is desired to enhance the representation ability. (iii)During the latter fusion process, current anchor graph fusion framework follows simple linearly-combined style while the intrinsic clustering structures are ignored. To address these issues, we propose a novel scalable and flexible anchor graph fusion framework for multi-view graph clustering method in this paper. Specially, the anchor graph construction and graph alignment are jointly optimized in our unified framework to boost clustering quality. Moreover, we present a novel structural alignment regularization to adaptively fuse multiple anchor graphs with different magnitudes. In addition, our proposed method inherits the linear complexity of existing anchor strategies respecting to the sample number, which is time-economical for large-scale data. Experiments conducted on various benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of the newly proposed anchor graph fusion framework against the existing state-of-the-arts over the clustering performance promotion and time expenditure. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/wangsiwei2010/SMVAGC-SF.
18 May 2022 in IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems
Multiview clustering (MVC) seamlessly combines homogeneous information and allocates data samples into different communities, which has shown significant effectiveness for unsupervised tasks in recent years. However, some views of samples may be incomplete due to unfinished data collection or storage failure in reality, which refers to the so-called incomplete multiview clustering (IMVC). Despite many IMVC pioneer frameworks have been introduced, the majority of their approaches are limited by the cubic time complexity and quadratic space complexity which heavily prevent them from being employed in large-scale IMVC tasks. Moreover, the massively introduced hyper-parameters in existing methods are not practical in real applications. Inspired by recent unsupervised multiview prototype progress, we propose a novel parameter-free and scalable incomplete multiview clustering framework with the prototype graph termed PSIMVC-PG to solve the aforementioned issues. Different from existing full pair-wise graph studying, we construct an incomplete prototype graph to flexibly capture the relations between existing instances and discriminate prototypes. Moreover, PSIMVC-PG can directly obtain the prototype graph without pre-process of searching hyper-parameters. We conduct massive experiments on various incomplete multiview tasks, and the performances show clear advantages over existing methods. The code of PSIMVC-PG can be publicly downloaded at https://github.com/wangsiwei2010/PSIMVC-PG.
22 November 2023 in IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems
Anchor technology is popularly employed in multi-view subspace clustering (MVSC) to reduce the complexity cost. However, due to the sampling operation being performed on each individual view independently and not considering the distribution of samples in all views, the produced anchors are usually slightly distinguishable, failing to characterize the whole data. Moreover, it is necessary to fuse multiple separated graphs into one, which leads to the final clustering performance heavily subject to the fusion algorithm adopted. What is worse, existing MVSC methods generate dense bipartite graphs, where each sample is associated with all anchor candidates. We argue that this dense-connected mechanism will fail to capture the essential local structures and degrade the discrimination of samples belonging to the respective near anchor clusters. To alleviate these issues, we devise a clustering framework named SL-CAUBG. Specifically, we do not utilize sampling strategy but optimize to generate the consensus anchors within all views so as to explore the information between different views. Based on the consensus anchors, we skip the fusion stage and directly construct the unified bipartite graph across views. Most importantly, $\ell_1$ norm and Laplacian-rank constraints employed on the unified bipartite graph make it capture both local and global structures simultaneously. $\ell_1$ norm helps eliminate the scatters between anchors and samples by constructing sparse links and guarantees our graph to be with clear anchor-sample affinity relationship. Laplacian-rank helps extract the global characteristics by measuring the connectivity of unified bipartite graph. To deal with the nondifferentiable objective function caused by $\ell_1$ norm, we adopt an iterative re-weighted method and the Newton’s method. To handle the nonconvex Laplacian-rank, we equivalently transform it as a convex trace constraint. We also devise a four-step alternate method with linear complexity to solve the resultant problem. Substantial experiments show the superiority of our SL-CAUBG.