Extended Gaussian kernel version of fuzzy c-means in the problem of data analyzing

Fuzzy c-means clustering with spatial constraints is considered as suitable algorithm for data clustering or data analyzing. But FCM has still lacks enough robustness to employ with noise data, because of its Euclidean distance measure objective function for finding the relationship between the objects. It can only be effective in clustering ‘spherical’ clusters, and it may not give reasonable clustering results for “non-compactly filled” spherical data such as “annular-shaped” data. This paper realized the drawbacks of the general fuzzy c-mean algorithm and it tries to introduce an extended Gaussian version of fuzzy C-means by replacing the Euclidean distance in the original object function of FCM. Firstly, this paper proposes initial kernel version of fuzzy c-means to aim at simplifying its computation and then extended it to extended Gaussian kernel version of fuzzy c-means. It derives an effective method to construct the membership matrix for objects, and it derives a robust method for updating centers from extended Gaussian version of fuzzy C-means. Furthermore, this paper proposes a new prototypes learning method and it obtains initial cluster centers using new mathematical initialization centers for the new effective objective function of fuzzy c-means, so that this paper tries to minimize the iteration of algorithms to obtain more accurate result. Initial experiment will be done with an artificially generated data to show how effectively the new proposed Gaussian version of fuzzy C-means works in obtaining clusters, and then the proposed methods can be implemented to cluster the Wisconsin breast cancer database into two clusters for the classes benign and malignant. To show the effective performance of proposed fuzzy c-means with new initialization of centers of clusters, this work compares the results with results of recent fuzzy c-means algorithm; in addition, it uses Silhouette method to validate the obtained clusters from breast cancer datasets.     

Classification and prediction of road traffic usingapplication-specific fuzzy clustering

In the field of road traffic management, fuzzy techniques have already been used for traffic control. In this paper, we use fuzzy methods for traffic data analysis. The results of the data analysis are classification and prediction systems. Our work is focused on fuzzy clustering methods. The known clustering models are extended to: constrained prototypes, the use of a mix of different prototypes for one data set, partial supervision of the clustering, and the estimation of the number of clusters by cluster merging. Two successful application examples are given. The first one is the classification of traffic jam on a German autobahn, and the second application is a long-term prediction of traffic volume     

Rough–Fuzzy Collaborative Clustering

In this study, we introduce a novel clustering architecture, in which several subsets of patterns can be processed together with an objective of finding a common structure. The structure revealed at the global level is determined by exchanging prototypes of the subsets of data and by moving prototypes of the corresponding clusters toward each other. Thereby, the required communication links are established at the level of cluster prototypes and partition matrices, without hampering the security concerns. A detailed clustering algorithm is developed by integrating the advantages of both fuzzy sets and rough sets, and a measure of quantitative analysis of the experimental results is provided for synthetic and real-world data.     

一种扩展的条件模糊C-均值聚类算法

在综合分析标准的模糊C-均值聚类算法和条件模糊C-均值聚类算法基础上,对模糊划分空间进行修改,进一步弱化模糊划分矩阵的约束,给出一种扩展的条件模糊C-均值聚类算法。算法的划分矩阵和原型不依赖于背景约束及模糊划分矩阵的隶属度总和。实验结果表明：该算法可以得到不同的聚类原型,并具有很好的聚类效果。     

Rough-fuzzy collaborative clustering.

In this study, we introduce a novel clustering architecture, in which several subsets of patterns can be processed together with an objective of finding a common structure. The structure revealed at the global level is determined by exchanging prototypes of the subsets of data and by moving prototypes of the corresponding clusters toward each other. Thereby, the required communication links are established at the level of cluster prototypes and partition matrices, without hampering the security concerns. A detailed clustering algorithm is developed by integrating the advantages of both fuzzy sets and rough sets, and a measure of quantitative analysis of the experimental results is provided for synthetic and real-world data.     

Interactive clustering and merging with a new fuzzy expected value

Major problems exist in both crisp and fuzzy clustering algorithms. The fuzzy c-means type of algorithms use weights determined by a power m of inverse distances that remains fixed over all iterations and over all clusters, even though smaller clusters should have a larger m. Our method uses a different “distance” for each cluster that changes over the early iterations to fit the clusters. Comparisons show improved results. We also address other perplexing problems in clustering: (i) find the optimal number K of clusters; (ii) assess the validity of a given clustering; (iii) prevent the selection of seed vectors as initial prototypes from affecting the clustering; (iv) prevent the order of merging from affecting the clustering; and (v) permit the clusters to form more natural shapes rather than forcing them into normed balls of the distance function. We employ a relatively large number K of uniformly randomly distributed seeds and then thin them to leave fewer uniformly distributed seeds. Next, the main loop iterates by assigning the feature vectors and computing new fuzzy prototypes. Our fuzzy merging then merges any clusters that are too close to each other. We use a modified Xie-Bene validity measure as the goodness of clustering measure for multiple values of K in a user-interaction approach where the user selects two parameters (for eliminating clusters and merging clusters after viewing the results thus far). The algorithm is compared with the fuzzy c-means on the iris data and on the Wisconsin breast cancer data.     

Study on multi-center fuzzy C-means algorithm based on transitive closure and spectral clustering

Fuzzy C-means (FCM) clustering has been widely used successfully in many real-world applications. However, the FCM algorithm is sensitive to the initial prototypes, and it cannot handle non-traditional curved clusters. In this paper, a multi-center fuzzy C-means algorithm based on transitive closure and spectral clustering (MFCM-TCSC) is provided. In this algorithm, the initial guesses of the locations of the cluster centers or the membership values are not necessary. Multi-centers are adopted to represent the non-spherical shape of clusters. Thus, the clustering algorithm with multi-center clusters can handle non-traditional curved clusters. The novel algorithm contains three phases. First, the dataset is partitioned into some subclusters by FCM algorithm with multi-centers. Then, the subclusters are merged by spectral clustering. Finally, based on these two clustering results, the final results are obtained. When merging subclusters, we adopt the lattice similarity method as the distance between two subclusters, which has explicit form when we use the fuzzy membership values of subclusters as the features. Experimental results on two artificial datasets, UCI dataset and real image segmentation show that the proposed method outperforms traditional FCM algorithm and spectral clustering obviously in efficiency and robustness.     

基于密度的模糊代表点聚类算法

结合密度聚类和模糊聚类的特点,提出一种基于密度的模糊代表点聚类算法.首先利用密度对数据点成为候选聚类中心点的可能性进行处理,密度越高的点成为聚类中心点的可能性越大;然后利用模糊方法对聚类中心点进行确定;最后通过合并聚类中心点确定最终的聚类中心.所提出算法具有很好的自适应性,能够处理不同形状的聚类问题,无需提前规定聚类个数,能够自动确定真实存在的聚类中心点,可解释性好.通过结合不同聚类方法的优点,最终实现对数据的有效划分.此外,所提出的算法对于聚类数和初始化、处理不同形状的聚类问题以及应对异常值等方面具有较好的鲁棒性.通过在人工数据集和UCI真实数据集上进行实验,表明所提出算法具有较好的聚类性能和广泛的适用性.     

A multi-prototype clustering algorithm

Clustering is an important unsupervised learning technique widely used to discover the inherent structure of a given data set. Some existing clustering algorithms uses single prototype to represent each cluster, which may not adequately model the clusters of arbitrary shape and size and hence limit the clustering performance on complex data structure. This paper proposes a clustering algorithm to represent one cluster by multiple prototypes. The squared-error clustering is used to produce a number of prototypes to locate the regions of high density because of its low computational cost and yet good performance. A separation measure is proposed to evaluate how well two prototypes are separated. Multiple prototypes with small separations are grouped into a given number of clusters in the agglomerative method. New prototypes are iteratively added to improve the poor cluster separations. As a result, the proposed algorithm can discover the clusters of complex structure with robustness to initial settings. Experimental results on both synthetic and real data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed clustering algorithm.     

Attribute weighted mercer kernel based fuzzy clustering algorithm for general non-spherical datasets

Clustering analysis is an important topic in artificial intelligence, data mining and pattern recognition research. Conventional clustering algorithms, for instance, the famous Fuzzy C-means clustering algorithm (FCM), assume that all the attributes are equally relevant to all the clusters. However in most domains, especially for high-dimensional dataset, some attributes are irrelevant, and some relevant ones are less important than others with respect to a specific class. In this paper, such imbalances between the attributes are considered and a new weighted fuzzy kernel-clustering algorithm (WFKCA) is presented. WFKCA performs clustering in a kernel feature space mapped by mercer kernels. Compared with the conventional hard kernel-clustering algorithm, WFKCA can yield the meaningful prototypes (cluster centers) of the clusters. Numerical convergence properties of WFKCA are also discussed. For in-depth studies, WFKCA is extended to WFKCA2, which has been demonstrated as a useful tool for clustering incomplete data. Numerical examples demonstrate the effectiveness of the new WFKCA algorithm     

A robust competitive clustering algorithm with applications incomputer vision

This paper addresses three major issues associated with conventional partitional clustering, namely, sensitivity to initialization, difficulty in determining the number of clusters, and sensitivity to noise and outliers. The proposed robust competitive agglomeration (RCA) algorithm starts with a large number of clusters to reduce the sensitivity to initialization, and determines the actual number of clusters by a process of competitive agglomeration. Noise immunity is achieved by incorporating concepts from robust statistics into the algorithm. RCA assigns two different sets of weights for each data point: the first set of constrained weights represents degrees of sharing, and is used to create a competitive environment and to generate a fuzzy partition of the data set. The second set corresponds to robust weights, and is used to obtain robust estimates of the cluster prototypes. By choosing an appropriate distance measure in the objective function, RCA can be used to find an unknown number of clusters of various shapes in noisy data sets, as well as to fit an unknown number of parametric models simultaneously. Several examples, such as clustering/mixture decomposition, line/plane fitting, segmentation of range images, and estimation of motion parameters of multiple objects, are shown     

Fuzzy and possibilistic shell clustering algorithms and theirapplication to boundary detection and surface approximation. I

Traditionally, prototype-based fuzzy clustering algorithms such as the Fuzzy C Means (FCM) algorithm have been used to find “compact” or “filled” clusters. Recently, there have been attempts to generalize such algorithms to the case of hollow or “shell-like” clusters, i.e., clusters that lie in subspaces of feature space. The shell clustering approach provides a powerful means to solve the hitherto unsolved problem of simultaneously fitting multiple curves/surfaces to unsegmented, scattered and sparse data. In this paper, we present several fuzzy and possibilistic algorithms to detect linear and quadric shell clusters. We also introduce generalizations of these algorithms in which the prototypes represent sets of higher-order polynomial functions. The suggested algorithms provide a good trade-off between computational complexity and performance, since the objective function used in these algorithms is the sum of squared distances, and the clustering is sensitive to noise and outliers. We show that by using a possibilistic approach to clustering, one can make the proposed algorithms robust     

Color image segmentation—an innovative approach

In this paper we describe a color image segmentation system that performs color clustering in a color space and then color region segmentation in the image domain. For color segmentation, we developed a fuzzy clustering algorithm that iteratively generates color clusters using a uniquely defined fuzzy membership function and an objective function for clustering optimization. The fuzzy membership function represents belief value of a color belonging to a color cluster and the mutual interference of neighboring clusters. The region segmentation algorithm merges clusters in the image domain based on color similarity and spatial adjacency. We developed three different methods for merging regions in the image domain. Unlike many existing clustering algorithms, the image segmentation system does not require the knowledge about the number of the color clusters to be generated at each stage and the resolution of the color regions can be controlled by one single parameter, the radius of a cluster. The color image segmentation system has been implemented and tested on a variety of color images including satellite images, car and face images. The experiment results are presented and the performance of each algorithm in the segmentation system is analyzed. The system has shown to be both effective and efficient.     

A New Fuzzy Set Merging Technique Using Inclusion-Based Fuzzy Clustering

This paper proposes a new method of merging parameterized fuzzy sets based on clustering in the parameters space, taking into account the degree of inclusion of each fuzzy set in the cluster prototypes. The merger method is applied to fuzzy rule base simplification by automatically replacing the fuzzy sets corresponding to a given cluster with that pertaining to cluster prototype. The feasibility and the performance of the proposed method are studied using an application in mobile robot navigation. The results indicate that the proposed merging and rule base simplification approach leads to good navigation performance in the application considered and to fuzzy models that are interpretable by experts. In this paper, we concentrate mainly on fuzzy systems with Gaussian membership functions, but the general approach can also be applied to other parameterized fuzzy sets.     

A potential-based clustering method with hierarchical optimization

This work proposes a novel data clustering algorithm based on the potential field model, with a hierarchical optimization mechanism on the algorithm. There are two stages in this algorithm. Firstly, we build an edge-weighted tree based on the mutual distances between all data points and their hypothetical potential values derived from the data distribution. Using the tree structure, the dataset can be divided into an appropriate number of initial sub-clusters, with the cluster centers close to the local minima of the potential field. Then the sub-clusters are further merged according to the well-designed merging criteria by analyzing their border potential values and the cluster average potential values. The proposed clustering algorithm follows a hierarchical clustering mechanism, and aims to optimize the initial sub-cluster results in the first stage. The algorithm takes advantage of the cluster merging criteria to merge the sub-clusters, so it can automatically stop the clustering process without designating the number of clusters in advance. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm produces the most satisfactory clustering results in most cases compared with other existing methods, and can effectively identify the data clusters with arbitrary shape, size and density.     

Determining number of clusters and prototype locations via multi-scale clustering

In clustering algorithms, it is usually assumed that the number of clusters is known or given. In the absence of such a priori information, a procedure is needed to find an appropriate number of clusters. This paper presents a clustering algorithm that incorporates a mechanism for finding the appropriate number of clusters as well as the locations of cluster prototypes. This algorithm, called multi-scale clustering, is based on scale-space theory by considering that any prominent data structure ought to survive over many scales. The number of clusters as well as the locations of cluster prototypes are found in an objective manner by defining and using lifetime and drift speed clustering criteria. The outcome of this algorithm does not depend on the initial prototype locations that affect the outcome of many clustering algorithms. As an application of this algorithm, it is used to enhance the Hough transform technique.     

Unsupervised possibilistic clustering

In fuzzy clustering, the fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering algorithm is the best known and used method. Since the FCM memberships do not always explain the degrees of belonging for the data well, Krishnapuram and Keller proposed a possibilistic approach to clustering to correct this weakness of FCM. However, the performance of Krishnapuram and Keller's approach depends heavily on the parameters. In this paper, we propose another possibilistic clustering algorithm (PCA) which is based on the FCM objective function, the partition coefficient (PC) and partition entropy (PE) validity indexes. The resulting membership becomes the exponential function, so that it is robust to noise and outliers. The parameters in PCA can be easily handled. Also, the PCA objective function can be considered as a potential function, or a mountain function, so that the prototypes of PCA can be correspondent to the peaks of the estimated function. To validate the clustering results obtained through a PCA, we generalized the validity indexes of FCM. This generalization makes each validity index workable in both fuzzy and possibilistic clustering models. By combining these generalized validity indexes, an unsupervised possibilistic clustering is proposed. Some numerical examples and real data implementation on the basis of the proposed PCA and generalized validity indexes show their effectiveness and accuracy.     

核空间广义均衡模糊C-均值聚类算法

目的 针对现有广义均衡模糊C-均值聚类不收敛问题,提出一种改进广义均衡模糊聚类新算法,并将其推广至再生希尔伯特核空间以便提高该类算法的普适性。方法 在现有广义均衡模糊C-均值聚类目标函数的基础上,利用Schweizer T范数极限表达式的性质构造了新的广义均衡模糊C-均值聚类最优化目标函数,然后采用拉格朗日乘子法获取其迭代求解所对应的隶属度和聚类中心表达式,同时对其聚类中心迭代表达式进行修改并得到一类聚类性能显著改善的修正聚类算法;最后利用非线性函数将数据样本映射至高维特征空间获得核空间广义均衡模糊聚类算法。结果 对Iris标准文本数据聚类和灰度图像分割测试表明,提出的改进广义均衡模模糊聚类新算法及其修正算法具有良好的分类性能,核空间广义均衡模糊聚类算法对比现有融入类间距离的改进模糊C-均值聚类(FCS)算法和改进再生核空间的模糊局部C-均值聚类(KFLICM)算法能将图像分割的误分率降低10%30%。结论 本文算法克服了现有广义均衡模糊C-均值聚类算法的缺陷,同时改善了聚类性能,适合复杂数据聚类分析的需要。     

A Possibilistic Fuzzy c-Means Clustering Algorithm

In 1997, we proposed the fuzzy-possibilistic c-means (FPCM) model and algorithm that generated both membership and typicality values when clustering unlabeled data. FPCM constrains the typicality values so that the sum over all data points of typicalities to a cluster is one. The row sum constraint produces unrealistic typicality values for large data sets. In this paper, we propose a new model called possibilistic-fuzzy c-means (PFCM) model. PFCM produces memberships and possibilities simultaneously, along with the usual point prototypes or cluster centers for each cluster. PFCM is a hybridization of possibilistic c-means (PCM) and fuzzy c-means (FCM) that often avoids various problems of PCM, FCM and FPCM. PFCM solves the noise sensitivity defect of FCM, overcomes the coincident clusters problem of PCM and eliminates the row sum constraints of FPCM. We derive the first-order necessary conditions for extrema of the PFCM objective function, and use them as the basis for a standard alternating optimization approach to finding local minima of the PFCM objective functional. Several numerical examples are given that compare FCM and PCM to PFCM. Our examples show that PFCM compares favorably to both of the previous models. Since PFCM prototypes are less sensitive to outliers and can avoid coincident clusters, PFCM is a strong candidate for fuzzy rule-based system identification.     

Agglomerative Fuzzy K-Means Clustering Algorithm with Selection of Number of Clusters

In this paper, we present an agglomerative fuzzy $k$-means clustering algorithm for numerical data, an extension to the standard fuzzy $k$-means algorithm by introducing a penalty term to the objective function to make the clustering process not sensitive to the initial cluster centers. The new algorithm can produce more consistent clustering results from different sets of initial clusters centers. Combined with cluster validation techniques, the new algorithm can determine the number of clusters in a data set, which is a well known problem in $k$-means clustering. Experimental results on synthetic data sets (2 to 5 dimensions, 500 to 5000 objects and 3 to 7 clusters), the BIRCH two-dimensional data set of 20000 objects and 100 clusters, and the WINE data set of 178 objects, 17 dimensions and 3 clusters from UCI, have demonstrated the effectiveness of the new algorithm in producing consistent clustering results and determining the correct number of clusters in different data sets, some with overlapping inherent clusters.