Adaptive weighted multi-view evidential clustering with feature preference

Abstract

Multi-view clustering has attracted substantial attention thanks to its ability to integrate information from diverse views. However, the existing methods can only generate hard or fuzzy partitions, which cannot effectively represent the uncertainty and imprecision when facing objects in overlapping clusters, thus increasing the risk of error. To solve the above problems, in this paper, we propose an adaptive weighted multi-view evidential clustering (WMVEC) method based on the theory of belief functions to characterize the uncertainty and imprecision in cluster assignment. Technically, we integrate view weight assignments and credal partition between objects and cluster prototypes into a joint learning framework. The credal partition offers a more comprehensive insight into the data by enabling objects to be associated with not only singleton clusters but also subsets of these clusters (termed meta-clusters) and the empty set, which represents a noise cluster. To avoid the interference of irrelevant and redundant features, we further present a weighted multi-view evidential clustering with feature preference (WMVEC-FP) to learn the importance of each feature under different views. We suggest the objective functions of WMVEC and WMVEC-FP and design alternating optimization schemes to obtain the optimal solutions, respectively. Through an extensive array of experiments, it has been demonstrated that our proposed clustering methods outperform other related and state-of-the-art methods in terms of their advantages and overall effectiveness.