JetBGC: Joint Robust Embedding and Structural Fusion Bipartite Graph Clustering

Bipartite graph clustering (BGC) has emerged as a fast-growing research in the clustering community. Despite BGC has achieved promising scalability, most variants still suffer from the following concerns: a) Susceptibility to noisy features. They construct bipartite graphs in the raw feature space, inducing poor robustness to noisy features. b) Inflexible anchor selection strategies. They usually select anchors through heuristic sampling or constrained learning methods, degrading flexibility. c) Partial structure mining. Existing methods are mainly built upon Linear Reconstruction Paradigm (LRP) from subspace clustering or Locally Linear Paradigm (LLP) from manifold learning, which partially exploit linear or locally linear structures, lacking a unified perspective to integrate global complementary structures. To this end, we propose a novel model, termed J oint Robust Emb e dding and Struc t ural Fusion B ipartite G raph C lustering (JetBGC), which focuses on three aspects, namely robustness, flexibility, and complementarity. Concretely, we first introduce a robust embedding learning module to extract latent representation that can reduce the impact of noisy features. Then, we optimize anchors via a constraint-free strategy that can flexibly capture data distribution. Furthermore, we revisit the consistency and specificity of LRP and LLP, and design a new unified structural fusion strategy to integrate both linear and locally linear structures from a global perspective. Therefore, JetBGC unifies robust representation learning, flexible anchor optimization, and structural bipartite graph fusion in a framework. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets validate our effectiveness against existing baselines.