TW-Co-MFC: Two-Level Weighted Collaborative Fuzzy Clustering Based on Maximum Entropy for Multi-View Data

In recent years, multi-view clustering research has attracted considerable attention because of the rapidly growing demand for unsupervised analysis of multi-view data in practical applications. Despite the significant advances in multi-view clustering, two challenges still need to be addressed, i.e., how to make full use of the consistent and complementary information in multiple views and how to discriminate the contributions of different views and features in the same view to efficiently reveal the latent cluster structure of multi-view data for clustering. In this study, we propose a novel Two-level Weighted Collaborative Multi-view Fuzzy Clustering (TW-Co-MFC) approach to address the aforementioned issues. In TW-Co-MFC, a two-level weighting strategy is devised to measure the importance of views and features, and a collaborative working mechanism is introduced to balance the within-view clustering quality and the cross-view clustering consistency. Then an iterative optimization objective function based on the maximum entropy principle is designed for multi-view clustering. Experiments on real-world datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.