A Survey and an Empirical Evaluation of Multi-view Clustering Approaches

Multi-view clustering (MVC) holds a significant role in domains like machine learning, data mining, and pattern recognition. Despite the development of numerous new MVC approaches employing various techniques, there remains a gap in comprehensive studies evaluating the characteristics and performance of these approaches. This gap hinders the in-depth understanding and rational utilization of the recently developed MVC techniques. This study formalizes the basic concepts of MVC and analyzes their techniques. It then introduces a novel taxonomy for MVC approaches and presents the working mechanisms and characteristics of representative MVC approaches developed in recent years. Moreover, it summarizes representative datasets and performance metrics commonly employed for evaluating MVC approaches. Furthermore, we have meticulously chosen thirty-five representative MVC approaches to conduct an empirical evaluation across seven real-world benchmark datasets, offering valuable insights into the realm of MVC approaches.