Incomplete Data Meets Uncoupled Case: A Challenging Task of Multiview Clustering

Incomplete multiview clustering (IMC) methods have achieved remarkable progress by exploring the complementary information and consensus representation of incomplete multiview data. However, to our best knowledge, none of the existing methods attempts to handle the uncoupled and incomplete data simultaneously, which affects their generalization ability in real-world scenarios. For uncoupled incomplete data, the unclear and partial cross-view correlation introduces the difficulty to explore the complementary information between views, which results in the unpromising clustering performance for the existing multiview clustering methods. Besides, the presence of hyperparameters limits their applications. To fill these gaps, a novel uncoupled IMC (UIMC) method is proposed in this article. Specifically, UIMC develops a joint framework for feature inferring and recoupling. The high-order correlations of all views are explored by performing a tensor singular value decomposition (t-SVD)-based tensor nuclear norm (TNN) on recoupled and inferred self-representation matrices. Moreover, all hyperparameters of the UIMC method are updated in an exploratory manner. Extensive experiments on six widely used real-world datasets have confirmed the superiority of the proposed method in handling the uncoupled incomplete multiview data compared with the state-of-the-art methods.