Abstract Beyond existing multi-view clustering, this paper studies a more realistic clustering scenario, referred to as incomplete multi-view clustering, where a number of data instances are missing in certain views. To tackle this problem, we explore spectral perturbation theory. In this work, we show a strong link between perturbation risk bounds and incomplete multi-view clustering. That is, as the similarity matrix fed into spectral clustering is a quantity bounded in magnitude O(1), we transfer the missing problem from data to similarity and tailor a matrix completion method for incomplete similarity matrix. Moreover, we show that the minimization of perturbation risk bounds among different views maximizes the fifinal fusion result across all views. This provides a solid fusion criteria for multi-view data. We motivate and propose a Perturbation-oriented Incomplete multi-view Clustering (PIC) method. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method