Integrating features and similarities: Flexible models for heterogeneous multiview data

We present a probabilistic framework for learning with heterogeneous multiview data where some views are given as ordinal, binary, or real-valued feature matrices, and some views as similarity matrices. Our framework has the following distinguishing aspects: (j) a unified latent factor model for integrating information from diverse feature (ordinal, binary, real) and similarity based views, and predicting the missing data in each view, leveraging view correlations; (ii) seamless adaptation to binary/multiclass classification where data consists of multiple feature and/or similarity-based views; and (iii) an efficient, variational inference algorithm which is especially flexible in modeling the views with ordinalvalued data (by learning the cutpoints for the ordinal data), and extends naturally to streaming data settings. Our framework subsumes methods such as multiview learning and multiple kernel learning as special cases. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework on several real-world and benchmarks datasets.