GRAE: Graph Recurrent Autoencoder for Multi-view Graph
Clustering
Ercong Cai Jin Huang∗
South China Normal University South China Normal University
Guangzhou, Guangdong Province Guangzhou, Guangdong Province
China China
caiercong@m.scnu.edu.cn huangjin@m.scnu.edu.cn
Shi Xu
South China Normal University
Guangzhou, Guangdong Province
China
ABSTRACT
Multi-view graph clustering aims to discover communities or groups
in the graph with multiple views, which usually can supply more
comprehensive information than that single-view graph cluster-
ing. With the increasing scale of complex data from the real world,
multi-view graph clustering has drawn much attention. It has a solid
theoretical foundation and high effectiveness in applications such
as data mining and social network analysis. However, Most existing
methods obtain the clustering result only through the shared feature
representations, defectively overlooking the unique features of mul-
tiple views. To fill this gap, a Graph Recurrent AutoEncoder (GRAE)
is proposed for attributed multi-view graph clustering, which can
attain node representation well by learning different view features.
Specifically, we first design a global graph autoencoder and a partial
graph autoencoder to extract the shared features and the unique
features of all views, respectively, which can better represent the
nodes in the graph. Then, from the perspective of representation
fusion, we adopt an adaptive weight learning method to fuse the
different features according to the importance of features. More-
over, we investigate a self-training clustering method to optimize
a clustering objective for improving the clustering effect. Finally,
we conducted a large number of experiments on three real-world
datasets, demonstrating the superior performance of our proposed
GRAE model on the multi-view graph clustering task.
CCS CONCEPTS
• Computer systems organization → Embedded systems; Re-
dundancy; Robotics; • Networks → Network reliability.
KEYWORDS
multi-view; graph clustering; recurrent autoencoder; adaptive weight
learning
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ACAI’21, December 22–24, 2021, Sanya, China
© 2021 Association for Computing Machinery.
ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-8505-3/21/12. . . $15.00
https://doi.org/10.1145/3508546.3508618
Bosong Huang
South China Normal University
Guangzhou, Guangdong Province
China
Jia Zhu
Zhejiang Normal University
Jinhua, Zhejiang Province, China
ACM Reference Format:
Ercong Cai, Jin Huang, Bosong Huang, Shi Xu, and Jia Zhu. 2021. GRAE:
Graph Recurrent Autoencoder for Multi-view Graph Clustering. In 2021 4th
International Conference on Algorithms, Computing and Artificial Intelligence
(ACAI’21), December 22–24, 2021, Sanya, China. ACM, New York, NY, USA,
9 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3508546.3508618
1 INTRODUCTION
Graph clustering, aiming to partition the nodes in the graph into dis-
joint groups, is a basic task in graph analysis. Typical applications
include biological network [1], group segmentation [2], community
detection [3], brain network [4], and structure analysis of commu-
nicating network [5, 6]. Nowadays, due to the rapid development
of big data and social media, the information existing in social net-
works shows a trend of diversification. For example, the same user
in the author network may have multiple relationships described
by multiple graph views such as co-author view and co-conference
view. In this sense, building multiple graph views (i.e., multi-layer
network) to represent the real-world data is more reasonable and
acceptable. In addition, the author can also take representative key-
words or labels such as database and mathematicians as attribute
information and sometimes treat attribute information as a par-
ticular view. We call this complex graph an attribute multi-view
graph. Unlike single-view algorithms that only focus on dealing
with a graph view [7–10], attributed multi-view graph clustering
methods entirely utilize shared and complementary information
among multiple views to achieve competitive clustering results.
Figure 1 shows the generation process of co-author view and
co-conference view on DBLP dataset1 (An author network). Fig-
ure 1(a) gives the node types of DBLP dataset and Figure 1(b)
represents the heterogeneous graph of the same dataset. In the
heterogeneous graph, a relation between two co-authors can be de-
scribed the meta-path as Author-Paper-Author (APA). Similarly, the
Author–Paper–Conference–Paper–Author (APCPA) means that
two authors have published papers in the same conference. Pre-
cisely because of the multi-type of edges and nodes in the heteroge-
neous graph, the traditional single-view graph clustering method
can not be directly applied to the heterogeneous graph [11]. Hence,
we only retain author-type nodes and separate different types of
edges to generate co-author view in Figure 1(c) and co-conference
1 https://dblp.uni-trier.de/
ACAI’21, December 22–24, 2021, Sanya, China
Figure 1: The generation process of co-author view and co-conference view
view in Figure 1(d) through the meta-paths APA and APCPA. We
can see that author D has the features of author B and C in the
co-author view and author A and B in the co-conference view. It is
evident that feature B is the shared feature of author D, and features
A and C are the unique features of author D. Therefore, a graph
with multiple views can better represent real-world graph data than
a graph only with a graph view [12].
Attributed multi-view graph clustering is one of the essential
tasks of multi-view learning [13]. Although there is in-depth re-
search on multi-view learning [14–16] and multiple-layer network
embedding learning [17–19], few works have studied the problem of
attributed multi-view graph clustering. Cen et al. [20] propound an
attributed multi-view graph embedded learning, called General At-
tributed Multiplex HeTerogeneous Network Embedding (GATNE),
which is a unified framework that supports both transductive and
inductive learning. Fan et al. [21] focus on the attributed multi-view
graph clustering problem and put forward the One2Multi Graph
Autoencoder (O2MAC) algorithm based on the shared features of
views. However, all of these methods only use the shared features of
multiple views to learn the features of the graph, defectively over-
looking the unique features of multiple views also do an excellent
favor for learning task.
In this paper, we put forward a novel Graph Recurrent AutoEncoder
(GRAE) model for attributed multi-view graph clustering to address
the above limitations. Specifically, the GRAE model obtains the
shared features and unique features of multiple views through the
Global Graph AutoEncoder (GGAE) and Partial Graph AutoEncoder
(PGAE), respectively. GGAE adapts a new graph recurrent neural
network to learn the shared feature representation of multiple views.
At the same time, PGAE aims to attain the unique features of mul-
tiple views, which leverages the graph autoencoder model to learn
the unique feature representation of the corresponding view. Next,
considering the importance of the different features, we design an
adaptive weight learning method to obtain the node representation
by fusing the shared features and the unique features. Finally, we
propound a self-training clustering method to make the node rep-
resentation more suitable for clustering to achieve better results.
We conducted a large number of experiments on three real-world
datasets, proving the effectiveness of our proposed GRAE model.
To summarize, our contributions can be summarized as follows:
• We emphasize the crucial significance of the inherent corre-
lation between the shared features and the unique features
of all views for utilizing the comprehensive information in
Trovato and Tobin, et al.
the graph. We also proposed a novel graph recurrent autoen-
coder model named GRAE to capture this inherent correla-
tion by exploiting rich complementary semantics among the
nodes of the graph.
• We design an adaptive weight learning and a self-training
clustering method, which can fuse the different features well
and get more accurate node representation which can lead
to better clustering results.
• We conduct experimental studies on three real-world datasets.
Abundant results show that GRAE can produce a more ro-
bust and accurate partition than other state-of-the-art view-
based graph clustering methods, which demonstrates the
effectiveness of our proposed techniques.
2 NOTATIONS AND PROBLEM DEFINITION
In this section, we first describe some notations and definitions and
then give details about the proposed method.
An attributed multi-view graph can be represented as G =
{V , E 1 , · · · , E M , X }, where V = {v 1 , · · · , vn } consists of N nodes.
M
And M sets of edges {Em }m=1 describe the interaction between
nodes in the corresponding M graph views. These M types of in-
teractions can be also described by adjacency matrices {Am ∈
R N ×N }m=1 M , where A m
mi j = 1 if ei j ∈ Em , otherwise Ami j = 1.
x i ∈ X indicates a real-value attribute vector associated with node
vi . Here we focus on the undirected and unweighted graph. For
clarity, important notations are summarized in Table 1. Then, we
formally define the problem as follows:
Table 1: Main Symbols
Notation Definition
M The number of graph views
X The node attributes
Am The adjacency matrix of the m-th graph view
Z дm The m-th embedded representation of GGAE
Z pm The m-th embedded representation of PGAE
Z The node representation of GRAE
D The embedding dimension of global graph encoder
d The embedding dimension of partial graph encoder
T The maximum training times of total objective function
λ Learning rate
α The coefficient of KL divergence loss
GRAE: Graph Recurrent Autoencoder for Multi-view Graph Clustering
Attributed Multi-view Graph Clustering: The attributed multi-
view graph clustering is designed to partition nodes in G into pre-
defined K disjoint clusters {C 1 , C 2 , · · · , C K }, so that nodes within
the same cluster are generally: (1) close to each other in terms of
graph views structure while distant otherwise, and (2) more likely
to have similar attribute values.
3 METHODOLOGY
In this section, we propose a novel model for attributed multi-view
graph clustering. The basic idea is to exploit both the shared fea-
tures of all views and the unique features for each graph view.
Specifically, we put forward a novel Graph Recurrent AutoEncoder
(GRAE) model, which works as follows: (1) obtaining shared feature
representation and unique feature representations; (2) designing
an adaptive weight learning method to fusing two feature repre-
sentations as node representation; and (3) proposing a self-training
clustering to optimize node representation to improve the cluster-
ing results. The overall scheme of the GRAE method is shown in
Figure 2.
3.1 Global Graph Autoencoder
Although multi-view graph data reflect the relationship between
nodes from different aspects, they should still have some common
node features. Hence, we propose a Global Graph AutoEncoder
(GGAE) model to learn the shared features of multiple views. As
shown in Figure 3, GRAE includes three parts: global graph encoder,
global graph decoder, and global reconstruction loss.
Global Graph Encoder: We propose a noval Graph Recurrent
Neural Network (GRNN) model as a global graph encoder to learn
shared feature representation from multiple views. As shown in
Figure 3, GRNN will gradually learn the features of the view to ob-
tain more shared features. These adjacency matrices {A1 , · · · , AM }
and node attributes X as the input of the global graph encoder. The
specific steps are described below.
In the first layer of graph recurrent neural network, we directly
use the node attributes X and adjacency matrix A1 as input. Thus
д
the embedded representation Z 1 is shown in Eq. (1).
Starting from the second layer of graph recurrent neural net-
work, in order to better retain the node attributes X, we fuse the
node attributes X and the hidden representation obtained from the
previous layer and use the adjacency matrix of this layer together
as the input. That is, we can calculate the hidden representation
д to obtain more shared features. As shown in Figure 4, the PGAE
Z 2 as shown in Eq. (2).
Finally, we get the shared feature representation Z д of the global
graph encoder as shown in Eq. (3).
д −1 −1
Z 1 = σ (D̃ 1 2 Ã1 D̃ 1 2 XWд1 ), (1)
д − 12 − 21 д
Z 2 = σ (D̃ 2 Ã2 D̃ 2 [Z 1 , X ]Wд2 ), (2)
..
. the unique feature representation Zl ∈ R N ×d of the l-th view can
д −1 −1 д
Z д = Z M = σ (D̃ M2 ÃM D̃ M2 [Z M −1 , X ]WдM ), (3)
where X ∈ R N ×F (N nodes and F features). Wд1 ∈ R F ×D is the filter
parameter matrix in the first layer. D̃ 1ii = j Ã1i j and A˜1 = A1 + I .
Í
I is the identity matrix of A1 and σ (·) is a relu activation function.
ACAI’21, December 22–24, 2021, Sanya, China
Finally, we would like to add that {Wдm ∈ R (D+F )×D }m=2
M .
Global Graph Decoder: A global graph decoder is proposed to
reconstruct graph views by the shared feature representation Z д .
Then the global reconstruction loss is proposed to optimize and
obtain more shared feature representations. The adjacency matrices
M are given as a prior value. Inner products
of graph views {Am }m=1
allow the rigorous introduction of intuitive geometrical notions,
such as the length of a vector or the angle between two vectors.
An inner product associates each pair of vectors in the space with
a scalar quantity known as the inner product of the vectors and
provides the means of defining orthogonality between vectors [22],
so we can use the inner product between two nodes to measure their
correlation. According to the correlation of the nodes, it is judged
whether there are edges between the two nodes to reconstruct the
M . Since our data have M graph views, we
multi-view data {Am }m=1
д
added parameters {Wm ∈ R D×D }m=1 M to better reconstruct multi-
view data. The formula of the global graph decoder is as follows:
д д
Âm = siдmoid(Z дWm Z дT ). (4)
We then minimize the sum of reconstruction errors for each
graph view by:
M
Õ д
Lд = loss(Am , Âm ), (5)
m=1
where Lд is the global reconstruction loss for all views. Owing
to the multi-view architecture of the global graph decoder, in the
backpropagation process, the gradient of the global graph decoder
will be propagated through the global graph encoder. Therefore,
the global graph encoder can capture the shared representation of
all views during forwarding propagation.
3.2 Partial Graph Autoencoder (PGAE)
As we discussed before, although we have gained the shared fea-
tures, the unique features of each view which describe the diversity
of different views are core factors to improve the quality of cluster-
ing. Therefore, we propose a Partial Graph AutoEncoder (PGAE)
to learn the unique features for each view. Since the graph au-
toencoder can learn the features of a graph view well [7, 23], our
proposed PGAE is composed of multiple graph autoencoders. Of
course, when we get unique features, we will also get some shared
features, which will not increase data noise and prevent us from
obtaining unique features but may promote node representation
model includes partial graph encoder, partial graph decoder, and
partial reconstruction loss.
Partial Graph Encoder: Because graph convolutional network
(GCN) can fully integrate the network structure and the node at-
tributes, multiple GCNs are used as the partial graph encoder to
learn the unique features of different views. Taking the l-th adja-
cency matrix Al and node attributes X as the input of the l-th GCN,
p
be obtained:
p −1 −1
Zl = σ (D̃l 2 Ãl D̃l 2 XWpl ). (6)
Partial Graph Decoder: Like the global graph decoder, the pur-
pose of the partial graph decoder is to reconstruct the adjacency
matrix of the corresponding view from the node representation
ACAI’21, December 22–24, 2021, Sanya, China Trovato and Tobin, et al.

p p
Figure 2: The framework of GRAE. The ⊙ is the element-wise product shown in (9), where the Z 1 , . . . , Z M and Z д all represent
an element.

Figure 3: The framework of GGAE

Figure 4: The framework of PGAE

obtained by the partial graph encoder. Therefore, we use multiple Then, we use partial reconstruction loss shown in Eq. 8 to obtain
graph decoders as partial graph decoder corresponding to the par- more unique features.
tial graph encoder. The following is to use the m-th graph decoder
to reconstruct the m-th adjacency matrix:
M M
p
Lm
Õ Õ
p p p pT Lp = p = loss(Am , Âm ). (8)
Âm = siдmoid(ZmWm Zm ). (7) m=1 m=1
GRAE: Graph Recurrent Autoencoder for Multi-view Graph Clustering
It can be seen from Eqs. (6), (7) and (8) that there is no interaction
between the unique feature representations of graph views so that
we can learn the unique features of the corresponding view through
the partial graph autoencoder.
3.3 Adaptive Weight Learning and
Self-training Clustering
Although we have obtained shared features through GGAE and
unique features through PGAE, these features are relatively inde-
pendent. Therefore, we put forward an adaptive weight learning
method to fuse shared and unique features and propose self-training
clustering collaborative training node representation to improve
the clustering result.
Adaptive Weight Learning: Due to the difference in the impor-
tance of the shared features and the unique features, we propose
an adaptive weight learning method to fuse the shared features
and the unique features. Because shared feature representation and
unique feature representation have good clustering performance
on most data sets, we need to preserve the independence of shared
features and unique features as much as possible to improve our
clustering performance further. Therefore, we propose the adaptive
weight learning method as follows:
w1 p wM p w M +1 д
Z =[ Z1 , · · · ZM , Z ]. (9)
mean(w) mean(w) mean(w)
In order to adaptive adjust and optimize the weights between
different features, we combine the adaptive weight learning and
self-training clustering as shown in Eq. (10).
Self-training Clustering: Although we fuse the shared fea-
tures and unique features through the adaptive weight learning
method, GGAE and PGAE are unsupervised graph embedding al-
gorithms, which may not guarantee that the node representation is
suitable for clustering. Therefore, we use self-training clustering
according to DEC [24] to improve the clustering as well as the node
representation. The self-training clustering objective is defined as
the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence loss as follows:
ÕÕ piu
Lc = KL(P ||Q) = piu loд , (10)
q iu
i u
where qiu is a soft assignment interpreted as the probability of
assigning sample i to cluster u. Then qiu is measured by using
Student’s t-distribution [25] as a kernel to indicate the similarity
between embedded point zi and cluster centroid µu :
(1 + ∥zi − µu ∥)−1
qiu = Í , (11)
k (1 + ∥zi − µ k ∥)
−1
After obtaining the soft assignments, we optimize the node repre-
sentation through learning from the high confidence assignments.
Therefore, the probability piu in the auxiliary target distribution P
is calculated as:
q 2 /fu
piu = Í iu 2 , (12)
k qik /fk
where fu = i qiu are soft cluster frequencies. As shown in Eq.
Í only the adjacency matrix as single-view graph clustering method
(12), we raise qiu to the second power, and then normalize the
frequency of each cluster to calculate piu .
ACAI’21, December 22–24, 2021, Sanya, China
Finally, we jointly optimize GRAE embedding and cluster learn-
ing through the total objective function as:
L = Lд + Lp + αLc , (13)
where Lд is global reconstruction loss, Lp is partial reconstruction
loss, Lc is KL divergence loss, and α is a coefficient of KL divergence
loss.
4 EXPERIMENT
In this section, we first describe the datasets we use to evaluate our
proposed model in Section 4.1, then present the our baselines and
experimental setup in Section 4.2. After that, we give the graph clus-
tering results by comparing our model to other baseline methods
in Section 4.3. Finally, we further discuss the parameter sensitivity
in Section 4.4.
4.1 Datasets
We study the effectiveness of our proposed GRAE model on three
public datasets. The statistics of these public datasets are shown in
Table 2 and the detailed descriptions are the followings:
• ACM2 : ACM dataset is a paper network dataset. We use
the two meta-paths as Paper-Author-Paper (PAP) and the
Paper-Subject-Paper (PSP) to construct a co-paper view and
co-subject view, respectively. Paper attribute features are
the elements of a bag-of-words represented by keywords.
The research fields of thesis Database, Wireless Communi-
cation, Data Mining as the ground-truth labels are used in
our experiments.
• DBLP1 : DBLP dataset is an author network dataset. We
use the three meta-paths as Author-Paper-Author (APA),
Author-Paper-Conference-Paper-Author (APCPA), and Author-
Paper-Term-Paper-Author (APTPA) to construct a co-author
view, co-conference view, and co-term view, respectively.
Each author attribute features are the elements of a bag-
of-words represented by keywords. The author’s research
fields of database, data mining, machine learning, and infor-
mation retrieval as the ground-truth labels are used in our
experiments.
• IMDB3 : IMDB dataset is a movie network dataset. We use
the two meta-paths as Movie-Actor-Movie (MAM) and the
Movie-Director-MOVIE (MDM) to construct a co-actor view
and co-director view, respectively. Movie attribute features
correspond to the elements of bag-of-words of plots. The
movie type Action, Comedy, Drama as the ground-truth
labels are used in our experiments.
4.2 Baselines and Experimental Setup
4.2.1 Baselines.
To prove the effectiveness, we compare our proposed GRAE model
with three categories of methods: (1) single-view graph clustering
methods; (2) multi-view graph embedding/clustering methods; and
(3) attributed multi-view graph clustering methods. For those meth-
ods in (1), we use the adjacency matrix and the node attributes or
2 http://dl.acm.org
3 https://www.imdb.com/
ACAI’21, December 22–24, 2021, Sanya, China Trovato and Tobin, et al.

Table 2: The statistics of three public datasets

Dataset Features Nodes View Meta-paths Edges Class

co-paper PAP 29281
ACM 1830 3025 3
co-subject PSP 2210761
co-author APA 11113
DBLP 334 4057 co-conference APCPA 5000495 4
co-term APTPA 6776335
co-actor MAM 98010
IMDB 1232 4780 3
co-director MDM 21018

input. Then we show the best result among all input data. For the
methods in (2), we only utilize graph views as the input. For the
methods in (3), we use graph views and node attributes as the input.
Once baseline methods obtain the node representation, we use the
k-Means method for clustering.
• GAE [23] is a single-view graph autoencoder method based
on the variational auto-encoder (VAE).
• LINE [26] is a classical single-view graph embedding method,
which can maintain both the global and local network struc-
tures.
• MNE [18] is a scalable multi-view network embedding method,
which can represent information of Multiple types of rela-
tions into a unified embedding space
• PMNE [27] are multi-view graph embedding models, includ-
ing PMNE (c), PMNE (n), and PMNE (r).
• RMSC [28] is a robust multi-view spectral clustering method
via low rank and sparse decomposition.
• PwMC and SwMC [29] are multi-view graph clustering meth-
ods.
• O2MA and O2MAC [21]. O2MA is a variant of O2MAC,
which are both attributed multi-view graph clustering method.
The former doesn’t contain KL divergence loss in the total
function, while the latter does.
We provide the descriptions in our GRAE model series as below:
4.2.2 Experimental Setup.
Due to the different convergence rates of iteration in different
datasets, the training times of our GRAE model may be different.
Our GGAE model is repeatedly trained 1500 times on DBLP dataset,
100 times on ACM dataset, and 400 times on IMDB dataset, respec-
tively, while the PGAE model is trained 100 times on all datasets. For
DBLP and IMDB datasets, we will set the learning rate λ = 0.004 and
the coefficient of KL divergence loss α = 0.001. For ACM dataset,
we will set the learning rate λ = 0.001 and the super parameter
α = 0.1. In GGAE, the embedding dimension of global graph en-
coder D = 200 is set. In PGAE, the embedding dimension of partial
graph encoder d = 32 is set.
Since some clustering algorithms rely on initialization, we use
random initialization to repeat the experiment 10 times for all
methods, and show the average performance as the performance of
all methods. For the baseline models, we preserve all experimental
settings described in their corresponding literature.
4.2.3 Evaluation Metrics.
We certify the performance of our proposed method using the fol-
lowing 4 widely adopted evaluation measures: clustering accuracy
(ACC), normalized mutual information (NMI), F-Score (F1), and
adjusted rand index (ARI) [31]. For all metrics, a higher value de-
notes better performance. Each metric penalizes or favors different
properties in the clustering, and hence we report results on these
diverse measures to perform a comprehensive evaluation.

• PGAE: It is an attributed multi-view graph clustering method

which only considers the unique features of the multi-view
graph. The parameter settings of the PGAE are the same as
GRAE.
• GGAE: It is an attributed multi-view graph clustering method
which only considers the shared features of the multi-view
graph. The training times and parameter settings of the
GGAE model are the same as GRAE.
• (P+G)GAE: It is a combination method by merging the node
representations of the PGAE and GGAE directly. Except for
the maximum training times of the total objective function
T = 0, the other parameter settings are the same as GRAE.
• GGAE+KL: It is an attributed multi-view graph clustering
method which considers the shared features of the multi-
view graph and self-training clustering. The training times
and parameter settings of the GGAE+KL model are the same
as GRAE.
• GRAE: It is an attributed multi-view graph clustering method
which considers the shared features and the unique features.
4.3 Graph Clustering Performance
Table 3 demonstrates the overall performance of baselines and
GRAE model series on three public datasets. We highlight the best
performance separately in each table and have the following obser-
vations.
• Our proposed GRAE series substantially outperforms other
baseline methods in all four metrics. The results clearly show
that our GRAE model series are promising attributed multi-
view clustering method.
• The clustering performance of shared features obtained by
GGAE is higher than that of other clustering methods such
as O2MA and O2MAC. Like O2MAC, we combine GGAE and
the self-training clustering method for clustering. Compared
with other methods to obtain shared features, the clustering
performance of GGAE + KL is significantly improved, which
proves that our GGAE model can receive more features.
• All the multi-view graph clustering methods, i.e., MNF, PMNE
series, wMC series, O2MA series, are markedly better than
GRAE: Graph Recurrent Autoencoder for Multi-view Graph Clustering ACAI’21, December 22–24, 2021, Sanya, China

Table 3: Performance comparison of different methods of ACM, DBLP and IMDB datasets. The ’*’ represents the method run
out-of-memory on this dataset.

ACM DBLP IMDB

Method
ACC F1 NMI ARI ACC F1 NMI ARI ACC F1 NMI ARI
LINE 0.6479 0.6594 0.3941 0.3433 0.8689 0.8546 0.6676 0.6988 0.4268 0.2870 0.0031 -0.0090
GAE 0.8216 0.8225 0.4914 0.5444 0.8859 0.8743 0.6925 0.7410 0.4298 0.4062 0.0402 0.0473
MNF 0.6379 0.6479 0.2999 0.2486 * * * * 0.4268 0.2870 0.0031 -0.0090
PMNE(n) 0.6936 0.6955 0.4648 0.4302 0.7925 0.7966 0.5914 0.5265 0.4958 0.3906 0.0359 0.0366
PMNE(r) 0.6492 0.6618 0.4063 0.3453 0.3688 0.3688 0.0872 0.0689 0.4697 0.3183 0.0014 0.0115
PMNE(c) 0.6998 0.7003 0.4775 0.4431 * * * * 0.4719 0.3882 0.0285 0.0284
RMSC 0.6315 0.5746 0.3973 0.3312 0.8994 0.8248 0.7111 0.7647 0.2702 0.3775 0.0054 0.0018
PwMC 0.4162 0.3783 0.0332 0.0395 0.3253 0.2808 0.0190 0.0159 0.2453 0.3164 0.0023 0.0017
SwMC 0.3831 0.4709 0.0838 0.0187 0.6538 0.5602 0.3760 0.3800 0.2671 0.3714 0.0056 0.0004
O2MA 0.8880 0.8894 0.6515 0.6987 0.9040 0.8976 0.7257 0.7705 0.4697 0.4229 0.0524 0.0753
O2MAC 0.9042 0.9053 0.6923 0.7394 0.9074 0.9013 0.7287 0.7780 0.4502 0.4159 0.0421 0.0564
PGAE 0.8903 0.8977 0.6531 0.7038 0.4673 0.4403 0.2549 0.2135 0.4469 0.4198 0.0444 0.0549
GGAE 0.9092 0.9100 0.7034 0.7515 0.9074 0.9026 0.7253 0.7781 0.5041 0.4620 0.0815 0.0874
(P+G)GAE 0.9102 0.9112 0.7048 0.7532 0.9102 0.9035 0.7335 0.7875 0.5427 0.4586 0.0713 0.0981
GGAE+KL 0.9162 0.9167 0.7204 0.7665 0.9124 0.9054 0.7396 0.7928 0.5287 0.4621 0.0766 0.0957
GRAE 0.9183 0.9188 0.7233 0.7739 0.9183 0.9128 0.7478 0.8052 0.5522 0.4611 0.0802 0.1114

single-view graph clustering methods, i.e., GAE and LINE,

which prove that single-view graph clustering methods can
not effectively use the multi-view information in various
problems while multi-view graph clustering methods can
fuse different views to produce a more robust and accurate
partition.
• Especially on IMDB dataset shown in Table 3, the clustering
ACC of the GRAE model is 10% higher than that of the state-
of-the-art O2MAC model proposed in 2020, as other metrics
are also significantly improved.
Especially, to prove the effectiveness of using the unique features
of multiple views, we construct the (P+G)GAE model by easily
connecting the node representation of PGAE and GGAE. Table 3
demonstrates that the clustering performance has been obviously
improved. In addition, the last row in Table 3 demonstrates the
performance of the complete GRAE model. We find that GRAE
reach the best performance in all the cases, which demonstrates
our fusion and clustering strategies can lead to encouraging results.
4.4 Parameter Sensitivity Analysis
In this section, we explore how hyper-parameters influence the
performance of the GRAE model. Specifically we mainly report the
analysis of learning rate λ, embedding dimension of global graph
encoder D, and the coefficient of KL divergence loss α. For these
parameters, we set the random seed to 16, and other parameters
remain unchanged as the prior experiment settings.
It can be seen from Figure 5, if λ is too small, the gradient will
drop very slowly, resulting in that the loss function is likely to fall
on the saddle point or local minimum after GRAE training, and may
not even reach convergence. And if λ is too large, the loss function
may directly cross the global optimum and can not converge or
Figure 5: Performance in different learning rates on ACM
dataset
even diverge, resulting in rapid degradation of experimental perfor-
mance. Therefore, we set λ of the GRAE model to 0.001 to ensure
experimental results. At the same time, we can find that the metrics
ACC, F1, NMI, and ARI are positively correlated. As ACC value
grows, F1, NMI, ARI values also increase. Therefore, we only use
the ACC metric to represent the performance of the models for the
sake of simplicity.
Figure 6 shows the accuracy performance of our GRAE model
by ranging the global graph encoder’s embedding dimension D
from 40 to 400. On ACM dataset, we observe that the accuracy
performance is relatively stable, which indicates the embedding
dimension D has little effect on the accuracy performance. However,
on DBLP dataset, the accuracy performance fluctuates between
0.9058 and 0.9255. Under the different parameters D, the accuracy
performance varies significantly. Therefore, D = 200 is a good
choice for the embedding dimension of global graph encoding.
Similarly, as shown in Figure 6, on the two datasets, the impact
ACAI’21, December 22–24, 2021, Sanya, China
(a) Embedding dimension in (b) Embedding dimension in
ACM DBLP
(c) The coefficient α in ACM (d) The coefficient α in DBLP
Figure 6: The embedding dimension of global graph encoder
and the coefficient α of KL divergence loss on ACM and
DBLP datasets
of the KL divergence loss coefficient α from 0.001 to 0.512 on the
accuracy performance is entirely different. Between 0.001 and 0.016,
the accuracy performance on DBLP dataset shows a downward
trend, while on ACM dataset, the accuracy performance shows
an upward trend. Therefore, our model GRAE sets different KL
divergence loss coefficient values on different datasets.
5 CONCLUSION
In real-world applications, graph data can usually be represented
in many different views, and all these solutions are exciting and
reasonable from different views. In order to discover more accurate
and robust partitions, we put forward a novel GRAE model for
attributed multi-view graph clustering. We investigate the inherent
connection between the shared features and the unique features of
multiple views. Firstly, we design a global graph autoencoder and a
partial graph autoencoder to extract them from the graph. Next, we
propose an adaptive weight learning method to fuse them. At last,
we address a self-training clustering to obtain meaningful node
representation and produce competitive clustering results. Abun-
dant experimental results on three real-world datasets demonstrate
the superior performance and effectiveness of our proposed GRAE
model.
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