Structure-Enhanced Self-Supervised Weighted Information Bottleneck for Multiview Clustering

Multiview clustering (MVC) is a popular research topic in the fields of data mining and pattern recognition, which focuses on fully exploring and employing the correlations between views to jointly discover a consistent cluster structure across data. Typically, weighted MVC is a common clustering method aimed at learning the importance or weights of each view and applying them to explore the complementary information between views. However, current weighted MVCs primarily focus on the quality of each view while overlooking the crucial role of pseudo-label-based self-supervision in weight learning. In addition, most weighted MVCs only use a weighting mechanism to utilize complementary features without sufficiently considering the consistency relationship between the clustering results of individual views and the final clustering result. Aiming to solve the above problems, this article proposes a structure-enhanced self-supervised weighted information bottleneck (S2WIB) method for MVC. Specifically, the S2WIB method establishes a view-weight learning mechanism that leverages both the view-contained information and the self-supervised information to learn view weights, and then integrates the weighted information from different views. Meanwhile, based on the information bottleneck (IB) theory, it explores view correlations from two perspectives, namely complementary information and consistent view cluster structure information, thereby fully exploiting the potential information contained in multiview data. Experiments on various multiview text datasets, multifeature image datasets, multiangle video datasets, multimodal text-image datasets, as well as large-scale datasets and biological multiomics datasets, demonstrate that the S2WIB method performs effectively and exhibits superiority across various fields.