Incomplete multi-view clustering (IMVC) presents a significant challenge due to the need for effectively exploring complementary and consistent information within the context of missing views. One promising strategy to tackle this challenge is to recover missing views by inferring the missing samples. However, such approaches often fail to fully utilize discriminative structural information or adequately address consistency, as it requires such information to be known or learnable in advance, which contradicts the incomplete data setting. In this study, we propose a novel approach calledLatentStructure-Aware view recovery (LaSA) for the IMVC task. Our objective is to recover missing views through discriminative latent representations by leveraging structural information. Specifically, our method offers a unified closed-form formulation that simultaneously performs missing data inference and latent representation learning, using a learned intrinsic graph as structural information. This formulation, incorporating graph structure information, enhances the inference of missing data while facilitating discriminative feature learning. Even when intrinsic graph is initially unknown due to incomplete data, our formulation allows for effective view recovery and intrinsic graph learning through an iterative optimization process. To further enhance performance, we introduce an iterative consistency diffusion process, which effectively leverages the consistency and complementary information across multiple views. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method compared to state-of-the-art approaches.

Incomplete multi-view clustering (IMVC) is challenging, as it requires adequately exploring complementary and consistency information under the incompleteness of data. Most existing approaches attempt to overcome the incompleteness at instance-level. In this work, we develop a new approach to facilitate IMVC from a new perspective. Specifically, we transfer the issue of missing instances to a similarity graph completion problem for incomplete views, and propose a self-supervised multi-view graph completion algorithm to infer the associated missing entries. Further, by incorporating constrained feature learning, the inferred graph can be naturally leveraged in representation learning. We theoretically show that our feature learning process performs an Auto-Regressive filter function by encoding the learned similarity graph, which could yield discriminative representation for a clustering task. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in comparison with state-of-the-art methods.

Recently, cluster ensemble approaches have gained more and more attention [1]–[2], due to useful applications in the areas of pattern recognition, data mining, bioinformatics, and so on. When compared with traditional single clustering algorithms, cluster ensemble approaches are able to integrate multiple clustering solutions obtained from different data sources into a unified solution, and provide a more robust, stable and accurate final result.

Traditional cluster ensemble approaches have three limitations: (1) They do not make use of prior knowledge of the datasets given by experts. (2) Most of the conventional cluster ensemble methods cannot obtain satisfactory results when handling high dimensional data. (3) All the ensemble members are considered, even the ones without positive contributions. In order to address the limitations of conventional cluster ensemble approaches, we first propose an incremental semi-supervised clustering ensemble framework (ISSCE) which makes use of the advantage of the random subspace technique, the constraint propagation approach, the proposed incremental ensemble member selection process, and the normalized cut algorithm to perform high dimensional data clustering. The random subspace technique is effective for handling high dimensional data, while the constraint propagation approach is useful for incorporating prior knowledge. The incremental ensemble member selection process is newly designed to judiciously remove redundant ensemble members based on a newly proposed local cost function and a global cost function, and the normalized cut algorithm is adopted to serve as the consensus function for providing more stable, robust, and accurate results. Then, a measure is proposed to quantify the similarity between two sets of attributes, and is used for computing the local cost function in ISSCE. Next, we analyze the time complexity of ISSCE theoretically. Finally, a set of nonparametric tests are adopted to compare multiple semisupervised clustering ensemble approaches over different datasets. The experiments on 18 real-world datasets, which include six UCI datasets and 12 cancer gene expression profiles, confirm that ISSCE works well on datasets with very high dimensionality, and outperforms the state-of-the-art semi-supervised clustering ensemble approaches.