Efficient One-Pass Multi-View Subspace Clustering with Consensus Anchors
Suyuan LiuSiwei WangPei ZhangKai XuXinwang LiuChangwang ZhangFeng Gao
Proposes a scalable multi-view subspace clustering method that jointly learns consensus anchors and a fused graph with exact connected components, achieving linear time complexity and directly generating cluster labels without heuristic anchor sampling or post-processing steps.
Modern data applications frequently gather information across diverse formats and sources, such as text, images, and video representing the same underlying event. Multi-view subspace clustering groups these complex, high-dimensional datasets into meaningful categories by uncovering shared low-dimensional structures. However, conventional multi-view clustering methods suffer from cubic computational complexity relative to sample size, making them impractical for large-scale operations. Recent attempts to accelerate processing using representative "anchor points" rely on fixed, heuristic sampling methods and require multi-stage post-processing steps. These limitations degrade clustering quality, add hyper-parameter tuning overhead, and hinder real-time scalability.
The article introduces and evaluates a scalable, parameter-free algorithm named Efficient One-pass Multi-view Subspace Clustering with Consensus Anchors (EOMSC-CA). The primary objective is to demonstrate a unified framework that learns shared anchor representations and graph structures simultaneously, directly outputting discrete cluster labels without secondary processing steps.
To evaluate this approach, the authors integrated anchor learning, graph construction, and adaptive view weighting into a single mathematical optimization problem. A strict graph connectivity constraint ensures the resulting anchor graph contains exactly the required number of connected clusters. The researchers benchmarked the algorithm against eight state-of-the-art multi-view clustering methods across nine widely recognized image and object datasets, ranging from 400 to over 101,000 samples, measuring performance via accuracy, normalized mutual information, and F-score.
The evaluation yielded several key findings. First, the proposed method reduces computational complexity to scale linearly with the number of data points, allowing it to process the 101,499-sample YouTubeFace dataset where traditional methods fail due to out-of-memory errors. Second, the algorithm achieved top-tier clustering quality, attaining the highest accuracy on datasets such as Caltech101-7 (83.51%) and YouTubeFace (26.50%), and remaining competitive across all others. Third, it eliminates manual hyper-parameter tuning by learning view weights adaptively, whereas competing methods require tuning up to four parameters. Finally, sensitivity analyses confirmed that clustering performance remains highly stable across different anchor quantities.
These findings indicate substantial practical benefits for enterprise data processing. Organizations can lower computational infrastructure costs and shorten execution timelines when categorizing massive, multi-modal data streams. By eliminating post-processing discretization and manual parameter calibration, the framework reduces operational risk and deployment complexity while maintaining high clustering accuracy across diverse domains.
Organizations handling large-scale multi-view clustering tasks should consider adopting this unified consensus-anchor approach. Technical teams can leverage the authors' publicly accessible implementation to run pilot benchmarks against existing clustering pipelines, especially for workloads exceeding tens of thousands of records.
Confidence in these findings is supported by rigorous mathematical proofs of linear complexity and consistent experimental performance across nine standardized datasets. A slight limitation is that the user must still specify the target cluster count and search for the baseline anchor matrix dimensions, though performance shows minimal sensitivity to these selections.
- Paper: Co-regularized Multi-view Spectral Clustering, Abhishek Kumar et al. (2011). Provides the foundational co-regularized formulation for multi-view spectral clustering that EOMSC-CA extends into scalable, anchor-based consensus learning.
- Paper: Sparse Subspace Clustering: Algorithm, Theory, and Applications, Ehsan Elhamifar et al. (2012). Establishes the self-expressiveness and subspace clustering framework that underlies multi-view subspace clustering methods.
- Paper: Robust Subspace Segmentation by Low-Rank Representation, Guangcan Liu et al. (2010). Introduces low-rank representation principles for robust subspace segmentation, offering essential theoretical grounding for multi-view subspace graph construction.
- Paper: Kernel k-means: spectral clustering and normalized cuts, Inderjit S. Dhillon et al. (2004). Connects kernel k-means to spectral clustering and graph partitioning, informing the direct, one-pass output of discrete cluster labels without post-processing.
- Paper: Self-Tuning Spectral Clustering, Lihi Zelnik-Manor et al. (2004). Develops self-tuning spectral clustering mechanisms that motivate parameter-free graph learning approaches in subspace clustering.
- Paper: Let the Data Choose: Flexible and Diverse Anchor Graph Fusion for Scalable Multi-View Clustering, Pei Zhang et al. (2023). Generalizes anchor-based multi-view graph clustering by addressing fixed anchor counts across views and enabling flexible fusion of diverse anchor graph sizes.
