Multi-View Graph Learning by Joint Modeling of Consistency and Inconsistency

Graph learning has emerged as a promising technique for multi-view clustering due to its ability to learn a unified and robust graph from multiple views. However, existing graph learning methods mostly focus on the multi-view consistency issue, yet often neglect the inconsistency between views, which makes them vulnerable to possibly low-quality or noisy datasets. To overcome this limitation, we propose a new multi-view graph learning framework, which for the first time simultaneously and explicitly models multi-view consistency and inconsistency in a unified objective function, through which the consistent and inconsistent parts of each single-view graph as well as the unified graph that fuses the consistent parts can be iteratively learned. Though optimizing the objective function is NP-hard, we design a highly efficient optimization algorithm that can obtain an approximate solution with linear time complexity in the number of edges in the unified graph. Furthermore, our multi-view graph learning approach can be applied to both similarity graphs and dissimilarity graphs, which lead to two graph fusion-based variants in our framework. Experiments on 12 multi-view datasets have demonstrated the robustness and efficiency of the proposed approach. The code is available at https://github.com/youweiliang/Multi-view_Graph_Learning.

Automated summary

This article introduces a new framework for multi-view graph learning, which models the consistency and inconsistency of multiple views in a unified objective function. It effectively handles low-quality or noisy datasets by designing an efficient optimization algorithm that can obtain an approximate solution in linear time complexity. Experimental results demonstrate the robustness and efficiency of the proposed approach.