In real-world applications, not all instances in multi-view data are fully represented. To deal with incomplete multi-view data, traditional multi-view algorithms usually throw away the incomplete instances, resulting in loss of available information. To overcome this loss, Incomplete Multi-view Learning (IML) has become a hot research topic. In this paper, we propose a general IML framework for unifying existing IML methods and gaining insight into IML. The proposed framework jointly performs embedding learning and low-rank approximation. Concretely, it approximates the incomplete data by a set of low-rank matrices and learns a full and common embedding by linear transformation. Several existing IML methods can be unified as special cases of the framework. More interestingly, some linear transformation based full-view methods can be adapted to IML directly with the guidance of the framework. This bridges the gap between full multi-view learning and IML. Moreover, the framework can provide guidance for developing new algorithms. For illustration, within the framework, we propose a specific method, termed as Incomplete Multi-view Learning with Block Diagonal Representation (IML-BDR). Based on the assumption that the sampled examples have approximate linear subspace structure, IML-BDR uses the block diagonal structure prior to learn the full embedding, which would lead to more correct clustering. A convergent alternating iterative algorithm with the Successive Over-Relaxation (SOR) optimization technique is devised for optimization. Experimental results on various datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of IML-BDR.
@cite_16: One underlying assumption of the conventional multi-view learning algorithms is that all examples can be successfully observed on all the views. However, due to various failures or faults in collecting and pre-processing the data on different views, we are more likely to be faced with an incomplete-view setting, where an example could be missing its representation on one view (i.e., missing view) or could be only partially observed on that view (i.e., missing variables). Low-rank assumption used to be effective for recovering the random missing variables of features, but it is disabled by concentrated missing variables and has no effect on missing views. This paper suggests that the key to handling the incomplete-view problem is to exploit the connections between multiple views, enabling the incomplete views to be restored with the help of the complete views. We propose an effective algorithm to accomplish multi-view learning with incomplete views by assuming that different views are generated from a shared subspace. To handle the large-scale problem and obtain fast convergence, we investigate a successive over-relaxation method to solve the objective function. Convergence of the optimization technique is theoretically analyzed. The experimental results on toy data and real-world data sets suggest that studying the incomplete-view problem in multi-view learning is significant and that the proposed algorithm can effectively handle the incomplete views in different applications.
Based on multi-view matrix completion, MVL-IV tends to recover the incomplete multi-view data @math by exploring the connection among multiple views @cite_16 . Denote the reconstructed data matrices as @math , the formulation of MVL-IV is where @math is the basis matrix, and @math is the full representation matrix. MVL-IV is able to cope with the complex incomplete-view setting with both missing views and missing variables.