Enhancing Multi-View Clustering: A Sufficient Information-Theoretic Approach for Consistency Acquisition and Redundancy Elimination

Multi-view clustering (MVC) has gained widespread recognition as a valuable technique for enhancing clustering performance by harnessing diverse data sources. Nonetheless, current methods mainly concentrate on obtaining consistent information, often ignoring the risk of redundant information across different views. In this study, we propose a novel methodology, called Sufficient Multi-View Clustering (STMVC), which evaluates the multi-view clustering framework through an information-theoretic lens, intending to learn inter-view consistency information while removing redundant information among views. Specifically, we first utilize variational analysis to extract inter-view consistency information, and to further enhance the consistency information and minimize the redundant information between different views, we propose a sufficient representation lower bound. Furthermore, in order to improve the adaptability and generalizability of our proposed approach, we expand the application of STMVC to single-view scenarios and incomplete multi-view scenarios. The STMVC method provides a promising solution to the challenge of multi-view clustering and introduces a fresh perspective for analyzing multi-view data. To validate our model, we conducted a theoretical analysis based on the Bayesian error rate, and experiments on several multi-view datasets and single-view datasets show the outstanding performance of STMVC.