Kernel-based Weighted Multi-view Clustering

Exploiting multiple representations, or views, for the same set of instances within a clustering framework is a popular practice for boosting clustering accuracy. However, some of the available sources may be misleading (due to noise, errors in measurement etc.) in revealing the true structure of the data, thus, their inclusion in the clustering process may have negative influence. This aspect seems to be overlooked in the multi-view literature where all representations are equally considered. In this work, views are expressed in terms of given kernel matrices and a weighted combination of the kernels is learned in parallel to the partitioning. Weights assigned to kernels are indicative of the quality of the corresponding views' information. Additionally, the combination scheme incorporates a parameter that controls the admissible sparsity of the weights to avoid extremes and tailor them to the data. Two efficient iterative algorithms are proposed that alternate between updating the view weights and recomputing the clusters to optimize the intra-cluster variance from different perspectives. The conducted experiments reveal the effectiveness of our methodology compared to other multi-view methods.