On Regularizing Multiple Clusterings for Ensemble Clustering by Graph Tensor Learning

Ensemble clustering has shown its promising ability in fusing multiple base clusterings into a probably better and more robust clustering result. Typically, the co-association matrix based ensemble clustering methods attempt to integrate multiple connective matrices from base clusterings by weighted fusion to acquire a common graph representation. However, few of them are aware of the potential noise or corruption from the common representation by direct integration of different connective matrices with distinct cluster structures, and further consider the mutual information propagation between the input observations. In this paper, we propose a Graph Tensor Learning based Ensemble Clustering (GTLEC) method to refine multiple connective matrices by the substantial rank recovery and graph tensor learning. Within this framework, each input connective matrix is dexterously refined to approximate a graph structure by obeying the theoretical rank constraint with an adaptive weight coefficient. Further, we stack multiple refined connective matrices into a three-order tensor to extract their higher-order similarities via graph tensor learning, where the mutual information propagation across different graph matrices will also be promoted. Extensive experiments on several challenging datasets have confirmed the superiority of GTLEC compared with the state-of-the-art.