Fair Incomplete Multi-View Clustering via Distribution Alignment

Abstract

Incomplete multi-view clustering (IMVC) extracts consistent and complementary information from multi-source/modality data with missing views, aiming to partition the data into different clusters. It can effectively address the problem of unsupervised multi-source data analysis in complex environments and has gained considerable attention. However, the fairness of IMVC remains underexplored, particularly when data contains sensitive features ({e.g.}, gender, marital status, and age). To tackle the problem, this work presents a novel Fair Incomplete Multi-View Clustering (FIMVC) method. The proposed FIMVC introduces fairness constraints to ensure clustering results are independent of sensitive features. Additionally, it learns consensus representations to enhance clustering performance by maximizing mutual information and aligning the distributions of different views. Experimental results on three datasets containing sensitive features demonstrate that our method improves the fairness of clustering results while outperforming state-of-the-art IMVC methods in clustering performance.