A Belief Two-Level Weighted Clustering Method for Incomplete Pattern Based on Multiview Fusion

Incomplete pattern clustering is a challenging task because the unknown attributes of the missing data introduce uncertain information that affects the accuracy of the results. In addition, the clustering method based on the single view ignores the complementary information from multiple views. Therefore, a new belief two-level weighted clustering method based on multiview fusion (BTC-MV) is proposed to deal with incomplete patterns. Initially, the BTC-MV method estimates the missing data by an attribute-level weighted imputation method with k-nearest neighbor (KNN) strategy based on multiple views. The unknown attributes are replaced by the average of the KNN. Then, the clustering method based on multiple views is proposed for a complete data set with estimations; the view weights represent the reliability of the evidence from different source spaces. The membership values from multiple views, which indicate the probability of the pattern belonging to different categories, reduce the risk of misclustering. Finally, a view-level weighted fusion strategy based on the belief function theory is proposed to integrate the membership values from different source spaces, which improves the accuracy of the clustering task. To validate the performance of the BTC-MV method, extensive experiments are conducted to compare with classical methods, such as MI-KM, MI-KMVC, KNNI-FCM, and KNNI-MFCM. Results on six UCI data sets show that the error rate of the BTC-MV method is lower than that of the other methods. Therefore, it can be concluded that the BTC-MV method has superior performance in dealing with incomplete patterns.