Fuzzy C-means based clustering for linearly and nonlinearly separable data

In this paper we present a new distance metric that incorporates the distance variation in a cluster to regularize the distance between a data point and the cluster centroid. It is then applied to the conventional fuzzy C-means (FCM) clustering in data space and the kernel fuzzy C-means (KFCM) clustering in a high-dimensional feature space. Experiments on two-dimensional artificial data sets, real data sets from public data libraries and color image segmentation have shown that the proposed FCM and KFCM with the new distance metric generally have better performance on non-spherically distributed data with uneven density for linear and nonlinear separation.

Research highlights► A new distance metric based on distance variation is used to improve FCM clustering. ► The new distance metric can also be applied to kernel FCM for various data shapes. ► The proposed algorithms can be used for linearly and nonlinearly separable data.