View-Adaptive Multi-Granularity Anchor Learning for Multi-View Clustering

Multi-view clustering (MVC) based on anchor learning has been proven to be effective in improving clustering accuracy and efficiency. Existing MVC methods are mainly based on single-granularity anchor learning, that is, the number of anchors corresponding to different views is constant and consistent, which will lead to information redundancy or insufficient mining. In addition, aggregating anchors of varying scales from all views to obtain multi-view shared clustering results remains a problem to be further explored. To address the above problems, a novel MVC method named View-adaptive Multi-granularity Anchor Learning (VMAL) is proposed in this paper, where view-adaptive anchor pruning and view-shared sample clustering are jointly optimized. On the one hand, VMAL can dynamically adjust the optimal number of anchors for each view during optimization by exploiting the reconstruction error of samples. On the other hand, an intuitive and effective mapping-aggregation message passing strategy is cleverly designed, which first maps the anchor representations of different views to the cluster space and then transfers the obtained cluster information of anchors to the sample space through an aggregation matrix. As a byproduct, VMAL can directly obtain the discrete cluster distribution of samples without additional partitioning. Finally, an iterative optimization algorithm is developed to solve the proposed VMAL method. Experimental results on multiple datasets have demonstrated the superiority of VMAL in terms of clustering results when compared with other state-of-the-art methods.