  Federated multi-view clustering has the potential to learn a global
clustering model from data distributed across multiple devices. In this
setting, label information is unknown and data privacy must be preserved,
leading to two major challenges. First, views on different clients often have
feature heterogeneity, and mining their complementary cluster information is
not trivial. Second, the storage and usage of data from multiple clients in a
distributed environment can lead to incompleteness of multi-view data. To
address these challenges, we propose a novel federated deep multi-view
clustering method that can mine complementary cluster structures from multiple
clients, while dealing with data incompleteness and privacy concerns.
Specifically, in the server environment, we propose sample alignment and data
extension techniques to explore the complementary cluster structures of
multiple views. The server then distributes global prototypes and global
pseudo-labels to each client as global self-supervised information. In the
client environment, multiple clients use the global self-supervised information
and deep autoencoders to learn view-specific cluster assignments and embedded
features, which are then uploaded to the server for refining the global
self-supervised information. Finally, the results of our extensive experiments
demonstrate that our proposed method exhibits superior performance in
addressing the challenges of incomplete multi-view data in distributed
environments.
