Multi-View Clustering via Multi-Stage Fusion

Multi-view clustering (MVC) exploits the information captured from diverse views to partition data into different groups and attracts much attention recently. Despite significant progress, most MVC methods fuse multi-view information via one-stage fusion while neglecting the merits of multi-stage fusion which causes insufficient in utilizing rich information within data and therefore degrades the clustering performance. To this end, designing a functional framework that can fully exploit multi-view information becomes a key challenge in multi-view clustering research. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-stage fusion method, which elegantly unifies the late and early fusion into one unified framework, to capture sufficient information underlying the multi-view data and to effectively reduce the effect of low-quality views. Specifically, we construct a low dimensional latent representation from multi-view data by learning proper correlation among multi-view data in the early fusion stage. The late fusion establishes a new optimal combinational data partition from base partitions constructed by spectral clustering, which suppresses the influence of low-quality basic partitions. Then we couple the low dimensional latent representation with the learned combinational data partition to share the same cluster structure by $k$-means and maximization alignment. As a result, we collaboratively learn an accurate and robust partition representation for the following clustering task. Besides, the late fusion and early fusion are jointly learned to achieve mutual collaboration for better performance. Finally, an alternating optimization algorithm is designed to solve the resultant optimization problem. Extensive experiments conducted on eight datasets show the superiority of our method in terms of effectiveness and efficiency.