Hypergraph based semi-supervised symmetric nonnegative matrix factorization for image clustering

Semi-supervised symmetric nonnegative matrix factorization (SNMF) has been shown to be a significant method for both linear and nonlinear data clustering applications. Nevertheless, existing SNMF-based methods only adopt a simple graph to construct the similarity matrix, and cannot fully use the limited supervised information for the construction of the similarity matrix. To overcome the drawbacks of previous SNMF-based methods, a new semi-supervised SNMF-based method called hypergraph based semi-supervised SNMF (HSSNMF), is proposed in this paper for image clustering. Specifically, HSSNMF adopts a predefined hypergraph to build a similarity matrix for capturing the high-order relationships of samples. By exploiting a new hypergraph based pairwise constraints propagation (HPCP) algorithm, HSSNMF propagates the pairwise constraints of the limited data points to the entire data points, which can make full use of the limited supervised information and construct a more informative similarity matrix. Using the multiplicative updating algorithm, a discriminative assignment matrix can then be obtained by solving the optimization problem of HSSNMF. Moreover, analyses of the convergence, supervisory information, and computational complexity of HSSNMF are presented. Finally, extensive clustering experiments have been conducted on six real-world image datasets, and the experimental results have demonstrated the superiority of HSSNMF while compared with several state-of-the-art methods.