Multi-view Ensemble Clustering via Low-rank and Sparse Decomposition: From Matrix to Tensor

As a significant extension of classical clustering methods, ensemble clustering first generates multiple basic clusterings and then fuses them into one consensus partition by solving a problem concerning graph partition with respect to the co-association matrix. Although the collaborative cluster structure among basic clusterings can be well discovered by ensemble clustering, most advanced ensemble clustering utilizes the self-representation strategy with the constraint of low-rank to explore a shared consensus representation matrix in multiple views. However, they still encounter two challenges: (1) high computational cost caused by both the matrix inversion operation and singular value decomposition of large-scale square matrices; (2) less considerable attention on high-order correlation attributed to the pursue of the two-dimensional pair-wise relationship matrix. In this article, based on low-rank and sparse decomposition from both matrix and tensor perspectives, we propose two novel multi-view ensemble clustering methods, which tangibly decrease computational complexity. Specifically, our first method utilizes low-rank and sparse matrix decomposition to learn one common co-association matrix, while our last method constructs all co-association matrices into one third-order tensor to investigate the high-order correlation among multiple views by low-rank and sparse tensor decomposition. We adopt the alternating direction method of multipliers to solve two convex models by dividing them into several subproblems with closed-form solution. Experimental results on ten real-world datasets prove the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed two multi-view ensemble clustering methods by comparing them with other advanced ensemble clustering methods.