A novel clustering algorithm based on multi-layer features and graph attention networks

Clustering is a fundamental task in the field of data analysis. With the development of deep learning, deep clustering focuses on learning meaningful representation with neural networks. Ensemble clustering algorithms combine multiple base partitions into a robust and better consensus clustering. Current deep ensemble clustering algorithms usually neglect shallow and original features. Besides, rarel algorithms use graph attention networks to explore clustering structures. This paper proposes a novel Clustering algorithm based on Multi-layer Features and Graph attention Networks (CMFGN). CMFGN obtains multi-layer features through the hierarchical convolutional layers. Moreover, CMFGN combines the co-association matrix with original features as the Graph Attention Networks (GAT) input to obtain consensus clustering, which reuses original information and leverages GAT to inherit a good clustering structure. Extensive experimental results show that CMFGN remarkably outputs competitive methods on four challenging image datasets. In particular, CMFGN achieves the ACC of 82.14% on the Digits dataset, which is almost up to 6% performance improvement compared with the best baseline.