The autoencoder (AE) is an efficient feature extraction tool that learns latent representations from raw data by minimizing the reconstruction loss. Building upon the AE architecture, deep clustering models are designed to jointly optimize the deep neural network and perform unsupervised clustering. However, existing methods directly impose the clustering objective on the latent features produced by the AE network, thereby neglecting the potential conflict between data clustering and data representation. Specifically, data clustering aims to enhance data aggregation, whereas data representation focuses on ensuring that latent features faithfully reflect the manifold structure of the raw data. To address this issue, this article proposes an innovative expanded deep embedding clustering (E-DEC) model, in which the AE network is employed to seek better latent representations, and a novel residual expansion module (REM) is integrated to construct an expanded feature space that better serves clustering tasks. Furthermore, adversarial learning between the soft cluster assignments and a prior one-hot distribution is adopted in lieu of the conventional Kullback–Leibler (KL) divergence, so as to enhance the discrimination of different clusters and avoid the degeneracy problem. Finally, an entropy regularization technique is incorporated to adaptively refine the affinity graph throughout the clustering process, thereby reducing the sensitivity of clustering performance to the initial affinity graph. Extensive experiments on real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model over state-of-the-art deep clustering methods.

Deep multiview clustering provides an efficient way to analyze the data consisting of multiple modalities and features. Recently, the autoencoder (AE)-based deep multiview clustering algorithms have attracted intensive attention by virtue of their rewarding capabilities of extracting inherent features. Nevertheless, most existing methods are still confronted by several problems. First, the multiview data usually contains abundant cross-view information, thus parallel performing an individual AE for each view and directly combining the extracted latent together can hardly construct an informative view-consensus feature space for clustering. Second, the intrinsic local structures of multiview data are complicated, hence simply embedding a preset graph constraint into multiview clustering models cannot guarantee expected performance. Third, current methods commonly utilize the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence as clustering loss and accordingly may yield appalling clusters that lack discriminate characters. To solve these issues, in this article we propose two new AE-based deep multiview clustering algorithms named AE-based deep multiview clustering model incorporating graph embedding (AG-DMC) and deep discriminative multiview clustering algorithm with adaptive graph constraint (ADG-DMC). In AG-DMC, a novel cross-view representation learning model is established delicately by performing decoding processes based on the cascaded view-specific latent to learn sound view-consensus features for inspiring clustering results. In addition, an entropy-regularized adaptive graph constraint is imposed on the obtained soft assignments of data to precisely preserve potential local structures. Furthermore, in the improved model ADG-DMC, the adversarial learning mechanism is adopted as clustering loss to strengthen the discrimination of different clusters for better performance. In the comprehensive experiments carried out on eight real-world datasets, the proposed algorithms have achieved superior performance in the comparison with other advanced multiview clustering algorithms.