SOI-Net: Structural Optimization-inspired Interpretable Network for Incomplete Multi-view Clustering

Data missing is a common issue in real-world applications, posing significant challenges for incomplete data processing. Traditional incomplete multi-view clustering methods rely on manually-designed optimization problems based on prior interpretable knowledge, considering the full utilization of available data. However, their limited feature extraction capability may become a bottleneck. In contrast, deep optimization methods leverage learning-based nonlinear transformations for clustering. They primarily achieve data imputation through the generalization ability of deep models, but their model interpretability may be limited by the black-box nature. Moreover, most existing methods only explore the structure of each view independently, where these structures are fixed and cannot form a complete unified structure. To address these issues, we propose a Structural Optimization-inspired Interpretable Network (SOI-Net) for incomplete multi-view clustering. Specifically, we project the features of all views into a unified representation space with the un-missing information of the views as constraints. By optimizing consistent structural information, we preserve the structures of missing modalities in the unified representation space, thereby mitigating the impact of missing data. Meanwhile, we derive network components based on the optimization problem to guide the learning of structure and representation. The practical significance of these network components provides model design-level interpretability. Extensive experiments on six datasets validate the effectiveness of SOI-Net in handling incomplete multi-view clustering task.