Global Self-Attention-Driven Graph Clustering Ensemble

A clustering ensemble, which leverages multiple base clusterings to obtain a reliable consensus result, is a critical challenging task for Earth observation in remote sensing applications. With the development of multi-source remote sensing data, exploring the underlying graph-structured patterns has become increasingly important. However, existing clustering ensemble methods mostly employ shallow clustering in the base clustering generation stage, which fails to utilize the structural information. Moreover, the high dimensionality inherent in data further increases the difficulty of clustering. To address these problems, we propose a novel method termed Global Self-Attention-driven Graph Clustering Ensemble (GSAGCE). Specifically, GSAGCE firstly adopts basic autoencoders and global self-attention graph autoencoders (GSAGAEs) to extract node attribute information and structural information, respectively. GSAGAEs not only enhance structural information in the embedding but also have the capability to capture long-range vertex dependencies. Next, we employ a fusion strategy to adaptively fuse this dual information by considering the importance of nodes through an attention mechanism. Furthermore, we design a self-supervised strategy to adjust the clustering distribution, which integrates the attribute and structural embeddings as more reliable guidance to produce base clusterings. In the ensemble strategy, we devise a double-weighted graph partitioning consensus function that simultaneously considers both global and local diversity within the base clusterings to enhance the consensus performance. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of GSAGCE compared to other state-of-the-art methods.