Multi-View Utility-Based Clustering: A Mutually Supervised Perspective

Information in multiple views is typically symmetrical and distinctive. Multi-view clustering generally attempts to address two key issues: (1) how to mine/leverage additional useful information between different views for current view clustering, and (2) how to combine multiple clustering results from multiple views by using compatible and complementary information hidden in multiple views. In order to achieve this, we propose a multi-view clustering method, namely the multi-view utility-based clustering method (MUC), from the novel perspective of utility-based mutual supervision between different views. The proposed method, MUC, has notable merits: (1) It moves multi-view clustering from the level of feature and/or sample side to partition side information. That is, in order to handle the first issue, MUC considers how to use utility-based partition-level side information from all the other views for current view clustering. Such partition-level side information is consistent with human thinking; it is high-caliber and instructional for clustering. (2) The utility-based partition-level side information provided by other views complements current view information in a mutually supervised way. Then, we conduct multi-view clustering via a mutual supervision mode to circumvent the second issue. As a result, using an alternating optimization strategy, the objective function of MUC can be solved in a K-means-like way. Moreover, we leverage multi-view weight learning based on maximum entropy to integrate multi-view clustering results and further improve performance. The extensive experimental results on various multi-view datasets indicate that the proposed method is better than—or at least comparable to—the existing commonly used single- and multi-view clustering methods, in terms of both clustering performance and running speed.