A Dual-Masked Deep Structural Clustering Network With Adaptive Bidirectional Information Delivery

Structured clustering networks, which alleviate the oversmoothing issue by delivering hidden features from autoencoder (AE) to graph convolutional networks (GCNs), involve two shortcomings for the clustering task. For one thing, they used vanilla structure to learn clustering representations without considering feature and structure corruption; for another thing, they exhibit network degradation and vanishing gradient issues after stacking multilayer GCNs. In this article, we propose a clustering method called dual-masked deep structural clustering network (DMDSC) with adaptive bidirectional information delivery (ABID). Specifically, DMDSC enables generative self-supervised learning to mine deeper interstructure and interfeature correlations by simultaneously reconstructing corrupted structures and features. Furthermore, DMDSC develops an ABID module to establish an information transfer channel between each pairwise layer of AE and GCNs to alleviate the oversmoothing and vanishing gradient problems. Numerous experiments on six benchmark datasets have shown that the proposed DMDSC outperforms the most advanced deep clustering algorithms.