Performance comparison of fuzzy and non-fuzzy classification methods

In data clustering, partition based clustering algorithms are widely used clustering algorithms. Among various partition algorithms, fuzzy algorithms, Fuzzy c-Means (FCM), Gustafson–Kessel (GK) and non-fuzzy algorithm, k-means (KM) are most popular methods. k-means and Fuzzy c-Means use standard Euclidian distance measure and Gustafson–Kessel uses fuzzy covariance matrix in their distance metrics. In this work, a comparative study of these algorithms with different famous real world data sets, liver disorder and wine from the UCI repository is presented. The performance of the three algorithms is analyzed based on the clustering output criteria. The results were compared with the results obtained from the repository. The results showed that Gustafson–Kessel produces close results to Fuzzy c-Means. Further, the experimental results demonstrate that k-means outperforms the Fuzzy c-Means and Gustafson–Kessel algorithms. Thus the efficiency of k-means is better than that of Fuzzy c-Means and Gustafson–Kessel algorithms.