Imbalanced View Contribution Evaluation and Refinement for Deep Incomplete Multi-View Clustering

In real-world applications, multi-view data often suffer from missing situations due to privacy protection and sensor failures. Such incomplete scenarios not only reduce information availability but also cause significant imbalance among views: certain "strong views" dominate the fusion process, while "weak views" contribute marginally, undermining cross-view collaboration. Existing incomplete multi-view clustering methods mainly focus on handling missing data, but overlook the view contribution imbalance induced by incompleteness and its impact on representation learning and clustering performance. To address this issue, we first analyze the data imbalance caused by missing views and the resulting disparities in view learning quality. Then, we propose an Imbalanced Contribution Evaluation and Refinement framework (ICER) for imbalanced incomplete multiview clustering. Specifically, we employ Shapley values to quantify each view's marginal contribution, and incorporate unbalanced optimal transport to characterize distributional deviations across views. On this basis, we construct the view contribution imbalance metric to comprehensively evaluate cross-view collaboration and fusion quality, and design a collaboration enhancement module to explicitly reinforce inter-view cooperative optimization. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms existing incomplete multi-view clustering approaches, validating the effectiveness and necessity of explicitly modeling and mitigating view imbalance in imbalanced incomplete scenarios. Code is released at https://github.com/Evelyn-zhou24/ICER.