Consistency Meets Inconsistency: A Unified Graph Learning Framework for Multi-view Clustering

Graph Learning has emerged as a promising technique for multi-view clustering, and has recently attracted lots of attention due to its capability of adaptively learning a unified and probably better graph from multiple views. However, the existing multi-view graph learning methods mostly focus on the multi-view consistency, but neglect the potential multi-view inconsistency (which may be incurred by noise, corruptions, or view-specific characteristics). To address this, this paper presents a new graph learning-based multi-view clustering approach, which for the first time, to our knowledge, simultaneously and explicitly formulates the multi-view consistency and the multi-view inconsistency in a unified optimization model. To solve this model, a new alternating optimization scheme is designed, where the consistent and inconsistent parts of each single-view graph as well as the unified graph that fuses the consistent parts of all views can be iteratively learned. It is noteworthy that our multi-view graph learning model is applicable to both similarity graphs and dissimilarity graphs, leading to two graph fusion-based variants, namely, distance (dissimilarity) graph fusion and similarity graph fusion. Experiments on various multi-view datasets demonstrate the superiority of our approach.