An Efficient Federated Multiview Fuzzy C-Means Clustering Method

Multiview clustering has been received considerable attention due to the widespread collection of multiview data from diverse domains and sources. However, storing multiview data across multiple devices in many real scenarios poses significant challenges for efficient data analysis. Federated learning framework enables collaborative machine learning on distributed devices while preserving privacy constraints. Even though there have been intensive algorithms on multiview fuzzy clustering, federated multiview fuzzy clustering has not been adequately investigated so far. In this study, we first develop the federated learning mode into multiview fuzzy clustering and realize the federated optimization procedure, called federated multiview fuzzy C-means clustering. Then, we design an original strategy of consensus prototype learning during federated multiview fuzzy clustering. It is termed as federated multiview fuzzy C-means consensus prototypes clustering (FedMVFPC). We also further develop the federated alternative optimization algorithm with proven convergence. This study also introduces the notion of clustering prototype communication within the federated learning framework, and integrates the clustering prototypes of different views into a unified optimization formulation. The experimental studies on various benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed FedMVFPC method improves the federated clustering performance and efficiency. It achieves comparable or better clustering performance against the existing state-of-the-art multiview clustering algorithms.