CoFKM: A Centralized Method for Multiple-View Clustering

Abstract

This paper deals with clustering for multi-view data, i.e. objects described by several sets of variables or proximity matrices. Many important domains or applications such as Information Retrieval, biology, chemistry and marketing are concerned by this problematic. The aim of this data mining research field is to search for clustering patterns that perform a consensus between the patterns from different views. This requires to merge information from each view by performing a fusion process that identifies the agreement between the views and solves the conflicts. Various fusion strategies can be applied, occurring either before, after or during the clustering process. We draw our inspiration from the existing algorithms based on a centralized strategy. We propose a fuzzy clustering approach that generalizes the three fusion strategies and outperforms the main existing multi-view clustering algorithm both on synthetic and real datasets.