Collaborative Fuzzy Clustering From Multiple Weighted Views

Clustering with multiview data is becoming a hot topic in data mining, pattern recognition, and machine learning. In order to realize an effective multiview clustering, two issues must be addressed, namely, how to combine the clustering result from each view and how to identify the importance of each view. In this paper, based on a newly proposed objective function which explicitly incorporates two penalty terms, a basic multiview fuzzy clustering algorithm, called collaborative fuzzy c-means (Co-FCM), is firstly proposed. It is then extended into its weighted view version, called weighted view collaborative fuzzy c-means (WV-Co-FCM), by identifying the importance of each view. The WV-Co-FCM algorithm indeed tackles the above two issues simultaneously. Its relationship with the latest multiview fuzzy clustering algorithm Collaborative Fuzzy K-Means (Co-FKM) is also revealed. Extensive experimental results on various multiview datasets indicate that the proposed WV-Co-FCM algorithm outperforms or is at least comparable to the existing state-of-the-art multitask and multiview clustering algorithms and the importance of different views of the datasets can be effectively identified.