Simple Yet Effective Selective Imputation for Incomplete Multi-view Clustering

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Main Authors: Xu, Cai, Liu, Jinlong, Zhang, Yilin, Guan, Ziyu, Zhao, Wei, He, Xiaofei
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Xu, Cai
Liu, Jinlong
Zhang, Yilin
Guan, Ziyu
Zhao, Wei
He, Xiaofei
author_facet Xu, Cai
Liu, Jinlong
Zhang, Yilin
Guan, Ziyu
Zhao, Wei
He, Xiaofei
contents Incomplete Multi-view Clustering (IMC) has emerged as a significant challenge in multi-view learning. A predominant line for IMC is data imputation; however, indiscriminate imputation can result in unreliable content. Recently, researchers have proposed selective imputation methods that use a post-imputation assessment strategy: (1) impute all or some missing values, and (2) evaluate their quality through clustering tasks. We observe that this strategy incurs substantial computational complexity and is heavily dependent on the performance of the clustering model. To address these challenges, we first introduce the concept of pre-imputation assessment. We propose an Implicit Informativeness-based Selective Imputation (SI$^3$) method for incomplete multi-view clustering, which explicitly addresses the trade-off between imputation utility and imputation risk. SI$^3$ evaluates the imputation-relevant informativeness of each missing position in a training-free manner, and selectively imputes data only when sufficient informative support is available. Under a multi-view generative assumption, SI$^3$ further integrates selective imputation into a variational inference framework, enabling uncertainty-aware imputation at the latent distribution level and robust multi-view fusion. Compared with existing selective imputation strategies, SI$^3$ is lightweight, data-driven, and model-agnostic, and can be seamlessly incorporated into existing incomplete multi-view clustering frameworks as a plug-in strategy. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that SI$^3$ consistently outperforms both imputation-based and imputation-free methods, particularly under challenging unbalanced missing scenarios.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_10327
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Simple Yet Effective Selective Imputation for Incomplete Multi-view Clustering
Xu, Cai
Liu, Jinlong
Zhang, Yilin
Guan, Ziyu
Zhao, Wei
He, Xiaofei
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Multimedia
Incomplete Multi-view Clustering (IMC) has emerged as a significant challenge in multi-view learning. A predominant line for IMC is data imputation; however, indiscriminate imputation can result in unreliable content. Recently, researchers have proposed selective imputation methods that use a post-imputation assessment strategy: (1) impute all or some missing values, and (2) evaluate their quality through clustering tasks. We observe that this strategy incurs substantial computational complexity and is heavily dependent on the performance of the clustering model. To address these challenges, we first introduce the concept of pre-imputation assessment. We propose an Implicit Informativeness-based Selective Imputation (SI$^3$) method for incomplete multi-view clustering, which explicitly addresses the trade-off between imputation utility and imputation risk. SI$^3$ evaluates the imputation-relevant informativeness of each missing position in a training-free manner, and selectively imputes data only when sufficient informative support is available. Under a multi-view generative assumption, SI$^3$ further integrates selective imputation into a variational inference framework, enabling uncertainty-aware imputation at the latent distribution level and robust multi-view fusion. Compared with existing selective imputation strategies, SI$^3$ is lightweight, data-driven, and model-agnostic, and can be seamlessly incorporated into existing incomplete multi-view clustering frameworks as a plug-in strategy. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that SI$^3$ consistently outperforms both imputation-based and imputation-free methods, particularly under challenging unbalanced missing scenarios.
title Simple Yet Effective Selective Imputation for Incomplete Multi-view Clustering
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Multimedia
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.10327