Multi-View Clustering Based on Belief Propagation

The availability of many heterogeneous but related views of data has arisen in numerous clustering problems. Different views encode distinct representations of the same data, which often admit the same underlying cluster structure. The goal of multi-view clustering is to properly combine information from multiple views so as to generate high quality clustering results that are consistent across different views. Based on max-product belief propagation, we propose a novel multi-view clustering algorithm termed multi-view affinity propagation (MVAP). The basic idea is to establish a multi-view clustering model consisting of two components, which measure the within-view clustering quality and the explicit clustering consistency across different views, respectively. Solving this model is NP-hard, and a multi-view affinity propagation is proposed, which works by passing messages both within individual views and across different views. However, the exemplar consistency constraint makes the optimization almost impossible. To this end, by using some previously designed mathematical techniques, the messages as well as the cluster assignment vector computations are simplified to get simple yet functionally equivalent computations. Experimental results on several real-world multi-view datasets show that MVAP outperforms existing multi-view clustering algorithms. It is especially suitable for clustering more than two views.