Consensus graph and spectral representation for one-step multi-view kernel based clustering

Recently, multi-view clustering has received much attention in the fields of machine learning and pattern recognition. Spectral clustering for single and multiple views has been the common solution. Despite its good clustering performance, it has a major limitation: it requires an extra step of clustering. This extra step, which could be the famous k-means clustering, depends heavily on initialization, which may affect the quality of the clustering result. To overcome this problem, a new method called Multi-view Clustering via Consensus Graph Learning and Nonnegative Embedding (MVCGE) is presented in this paper. In the proposed approach, the consensus affinity matrix (graph matrix), consensus representation and cluster index matrix (nonnegative embedding) are learned simultaneously in a unified framework. Our proposed method takes as input the different kernel matrices corresponding to the different views. The proposed learning model integrates two interesting constraints: (i) the cluster indices should be as smooth as possible over the consensus graph and (ii) the cluster indices are set to be as close as possible to the graph convolution of the consensus representation. In this approach, no post-processing such as k-means or spectral rotation is required. Our approach is tested with real and synthetic datasets. The experiments performed show that the proposed method performs well compared to many state-of-the-art approaches.