Beyond Independence: Learning Correlated Views for Variational Incomplete Multi-View Clustering
This study addresses the limitation of conditional view independence in existing variational incomplete multi-view clustering methods by proposing a novel variational framework that explicitly models cross-view correlations. By parameterizing the covariance matrix via normalized Cholesky decomposition, the approach adaptively captures intrinsic data structures through posterior estimation errors under a unified optimization objective. This method overcomes the independence bottleneck with minimal additional parameters and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across multiple benchmark datasets. These results effectively validate the critical role of explicit cross-view correlation modeling in enhancing clustering performance for incomplete multi-view learning scenarios.