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

• The multi-center initialization method can get rid of the problems that the FCM algorithm is sensitive to the initial prototypes, and it can handle non-traditional curved clusters.
• The similarity matrix generated by the Floyd algorithm is notably block symmetric, which ensure the effective extraction of spectral features.
• The problem of clustering samples is transformed to a problem of merging subclusters, the computational load is low, and has strong robustness.

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.

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