Two Decades of Multi-View Clustering: Taxonomy, Application, and Challenge

Multi-view clustering (MVC), as an important machine learning task, aims to group data into distinct groups by leveraging complementary and consistent information across multiple views. During the last two decades, it has been widely studied, and many methods have been proposed, which has brought incredible development to this field. However, few works comprehensively summarize existing methods and point out the potential challenges in this field for the next decades. To this end, our survey thoroughly reviews existing MVC methods according to three taxonomies, i.e., techniques, fusion strategies, and scenarios. Specifically, seven typical techniques, four fusion strategies, and five typical scenarios are included. Besides, we also collect the commonly used datasets and analyze the performance of typical MVC methods. Moreover, we summarize six application scenarios of existing MVC methods ranging from computer vision, and information retrieval tasks to medical diagnosis and bio-informatics. In particular, we point out seven interesting future directions in this field, which will definitely enlighten the readers.