Multiple Kernel Clustering With Adaptive Multi-Scale Partition Selection

Abstract

Multiple kernel clustering (MKC) enhances clustering performance by deriving a consensus partition or graph from a predefined set of kernels. Despite many advanced MKC methods proposed in recent years, the prevalent approaches involve incorporating all kernels by default to capture diverse information within the data. However, learning from all kernels may not be better than one of a few kernels, particularly since some kernels exhibit a higher proportion of noise than semantic content. Additionally, existing MKC methods, whether based on early-fusion or late-fusion approaches, predominantly rely on pairwise relationships among samples or cluster structures, neglecting potential correlations between these two aspects. To this end, we propose a multiple kernel clustering with an adaptive multi-scale partition selection method (MPS), which exploits multiple-dimensional representations and the pairwise cluster structure for clustering. By the proposed kernel selection framework, potentially harmful kernels are dynamically excluded during the kernel fusion process, and then the multi-scale partitions and similarity graphs derived from the retained kernels are utilized to facilitate the improved consensus partition generation. Finally, extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of MPS on eight benchmark datasets.