Projective Multiple Kernel Subspace Clustering

Multiple kernel subspace clustering (MKSC), as an important extension for handling multi-view non-linear subspace data, has shown notable success in a wide variety of machine learning tasks. The key objective of MKSC is to build a flexible and appropriate graph for clustering from the kernel space. However, existing MKSC methods apply a mechanism utilizing the kernel trick to the traditional self-expressive principle, where the similarity graphs are built on the respective high-dimensional (or even infinite) reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS). Regarding this strategy, we argue that the original high-dimensional spaces usually include noise and unreliable similarity measures and, therefore, output a low-quality graph matrix, which degrades clustering performance. In this paper, inspired by projective clustering, we propose the utilization of a complementary similarity graph by fusing the multiple kernel graphs constructed in the low-dimensional partition space, termed projective multiple kernel subspace clustering (PMKSC). By incorporating intrinsic structures with multi-view data, PMKSC alleviates the noise and redundancy in the original kernel space and obtains high-quality similarity to uncover the underlying clustering structures. Furthermore, we design a three-step alternate algorithm with proven convergence to solve the proposed optimization problem. The experimental results on ten multiple kernel benchmark datasets validate the effectiveness of our proposed PMKSC, compared to the state-of-the-art multiple kernel and kernel subspace clustering methods, by a large margin. Our code is available at https://github.com/MengjingSun/PMKSC-code.

Automated summary

Multiple kernel subspace clustering (MKSC) is an important extension for handling multi-view non-linear subspace data. It aims to build a flexible and appropriate graph for clustering from the kernel space. However, existing MKSC methods suffer from noise and unreliable similarity measures in the original high-dimensional spaces, resulting in low-quality graph matrices and degraded clustering performance. Inspired by projective clustering, this paper proposes a projective multiple kernel subspace clustering (PMKSC) method, which fuses multiple kernel graphs in the low-dimensional partition space to alleviate noise and redundancy and obtain high-quality similarity for uncovering underlying clustering structures.