The potential of using fuzzy clustering in generating consumer profile

Bias-correction fuzzy clustering algorithms

This work presents a detailed framework to detect the location of heart sound within the respiratory sound based on temporal fuzzy c-means (TFCM) algorithm. In the proposed method, respiratory sound is first divided into frames and for each frame, the logarithmic energy features are calculated. Then, these features are used to classify the respiratory sound as heart sound (HS containing lung sound) and non-HS (only lung sound) by the TFCM algorithm. The TFCM is the modified version fuzzy c-means (FCM) algorithm. While the FCM algorithm uses only the local information about the current frame, the TFCM algorithm uses the temporal information from both the current and the neighboring frames in decision making. To measure the detection performance of the proposed method, several experiments have been conducted on a database of 24 healthy subjects. The experimental results show that the average false-negative rate values are 0.8 ± 1.1 and 1.5 ± 1.4 %, and the normalized area under detection error curves are 0.0145 and 0.0269 for the TFCM method in the low and medium respiratory flow rates, respectively. These average values are significantly lower than those obtained by FCM algorithm and by the other compared methods in the literature, which demonstrates the efficiency of the proposed TFCM algorithm. On the other hand, the average elapsed time of the TFCM for a data with length of 0.2 ± 0.05 s is 0.2 ± 0.05 s, which is slightly higher than that of the FCM and lower than those of the other compared methods.

Fuzzy clustering has been playing an important role in solving many problems. Fuzzy c-means (FCM) algorithm is most frequently used for fuzzy clustering. But some fixed points of FCM algorithm, known as Tucker's counter example, is not a reasonable solution. Moreover, the FCM algorithm is impossible to perform online learning since it is basically a batch learning scheme. This paper presents an unsupervised learning network as an attempt to improve the shortcomings of conventional clustering algorithms. This model integrates the optimization function of FCM algorithm into an unsupervised learning network. The learning rule of the proposed scheme is a result of formal derivation based on the gradient descent procedure of fuzzy objective function. Using the result of formal derivation, two implementations of the proposed scheme, the batch learning version and online learning version, are devised. They are tested on Chiou's data and Iris data and compared with FCM. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme derived the reasonable solution on Tucker's counter example.

The crow is one of the most intelligent bird and infamous for observing other birds so that they can steal their food. The crow search algorithm (CSA), a nature-based optimizer, is inspired by the social behavior of crows. Scholars have applied the CSA to obtain efficient solutions to certain function and combinatorial optimization problems. Another popular and powerful method with several real-world applications (e.g., energy, finance, marketing, and medical imaging) is fuzzy clustering. The fuzzy c-means (FCM) algorithm is a critical fuzzy clustering approach given its efficiency and implementation easily. However, the FCM algorithm can be easily trapped in the local optima. To solve this data clustering problem, this study proposes a hybrid fuzzy clustering algorithm combines the CSA and a fireworks algorithm. The algorithm performance is evaluated using eight well-known UCI benchmarks. The experimental analysis concludes that adding the fireworks algorithm improved the CSA’s performance and offered better solutions than those by other meta-heuristic algorithms.

Clustering approach is widely used in biomedical applications particularly for brain tumor detection in abnormal magnetic resonance (MR) images. Fuzzy clustering using fuzzy C-means (FCM) algorithm proved to be superior over the other clustering approaches in terms of segmentation efficiency. But the major drawback of the FCM algorithm is the huge computational time required for convergence. The effectiveness of the FCM algorithm in terms of computational rate is improved by modifying the cluster center and membership value updation criterion. In this paper, the application of modified FCM algorithm for MR brain tumor detection is explored. Abnormal brain images from four tumor classes namely metastase, meningioma, glioma and astrocytoma are used in this work. A comprehensive feature vector space is used for the segmentation technique. Comparative analysis in terms of segmentation efficiency and convergence rate is performed between the conventional FCM and the modified FCM. Experimental results show superior results for the modified FCM algorithm in terms of the performance measures.

Clustering is a potential tool of data mining. A clustering method analyzes the pattern of a data set and groups the data into several clusters based on the similarity among themselves. Clusters may be either crisp or fuzzy in nature. The present chapter deals with clustering of some data sets using Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) algorithm and Entropy-based Fuzzy Clustering (EFC) algorithm. In FCM algorithm, the nature and quality of clusters depend on the pre-defined number of clusters, level of cluster fuzziness and a threshold value utilized for obtaining the number of outliers (if any). On the other hand, the quality of clusters obtained by the EFC algorithm is dependent on a constant used to establish the relationship between the distance and similarity of two data points, a threshold value of similarity and another threshold value used for determining the number of outliers. The clusters should ideally be distinct and at the same time compact in nature. Moreover, the number of outliers should be as minimum as possible. Thus, the above problem may be posed as an optimization problem, which will be solved using a Genetic Algorithm (GA). The best set of multi-dimensional clusters will be mapped into 2-D for visualization using a Self-Organizing Map (SOM).

Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) algorithm has good clustering efficiency, for which it is widely used in the field of image segmentation. However, problems such as weak robustness of distance measure, the number of initial clustering to be given in advance and not considering local image feature still exist. In essence, FCM is a local search algorithm. Improper selection of initial value will lead to the need for more iterations and convergence to local optimal solution. By combining evolving clustering (ECM) with FCM algorithm, a new method of remote sensing image segmentation is put forward. By using FCM algorithm to solve the choice of ECM's initialization clustering centers and using FCM to optimize the obtained centers, fuzzy clustering is completed. And by converting fuzzy into a certainty classification, clustering segmentation is realized. The algorithm is typical of relatively less iterations of convergence to global optimum, good stability and robustness. Experiment results show that it helps to produce better segmentation effect and improve the efficiency of remote sensing image segmentation.

In this paper, we show how one can take advantage of the stability and effectiveness of object data clustering algorithms when the data to be clustered are available in the form of mutual numerical relationships between pairs of objects. More precisely, we propose a new fuzzy relational algorithm, based on the popular fuzzy C-means (FCM) algorithm, which does not require any particular restriction on the relation matrix. We describe the application of the algorithm to four real and four synthetic data sets, and show that our algorithm performs better than well-known fuzzy relational clustering algorithms on all these sets.

Although fuzzy c-means algorithm has shown great capability to spherical clusters, it can not perform very well on non-spherical data sets yet. To deal with this problem, kernel-based fuzzy clustering has been presented by mapping data points into a high-dimensional Hilbert space with kernel functions. However, the computational complexity of kernel matrix is always quadratic, usually makes kernel fuzzy clustering non-scalable to large data sets. Recently, random features display a strong capability in approximating kernel functions while satisfying appropriate memory requirements. Therefore, we introduce two fuzzy clustering schemes in this paper based on random feature mapping and dimension reduction methods to approximate kernel fuzzy c-means clustering on general size data sets and one large data set. The clustering results illustrate the great potential of the proposed approaches.

In order to overcome the poor anti-noise performance of traditional fuzzy C-Means (FCM) algorithm in image segmentation, a novel improved FCM algorithm was proposed in this paper based on Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm and Markov Random Field (MRF) model, which can make full use of the global searching ability of PSO and the spatial information integrating ability of MRF for image segmentation. In this algorithm, the image segmentation is converted to a PSO optimization problem, in which the fitness function is set up to containing the spatial information based on the spectral value and the neighboring pixels modeled by MRFs. And segmentation results can be iteratively obtained during the PSO iterations according to the newly designed membership function of FCM in which the spatial information is integrated. The experiments herein reported in this paper illustrate the better performance of this algorithm than the traditional FCM algorithm and the PSO algorithm for image segmentation.

Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) algorithm is a fuzzy pattern recognition method. Clustering precision of the algorithm is affected by its equal partition trend for data set of large discrepancy of each class samples number, and the optimal clustering result of the algorithm mightn't be a right partition in this case. In order to overcome this disadvantage, a Gaussian function Weighted Fuzzy C-Means (WFCM) algorithm is proposed, which the weighted function is produced by a Gaussian function calculating dot density of each sample. To certain extent, the WFCM algorithm has not only overcome the limitation of equal partition trend in fuzzy Cmeans algorithm, but also been favorable convergence and stability. The calculation of the weighted function and the choice of sample dot density range restriction value for the algorithm are both objective. When partially supervised information obtained from a few labeled samples is introduced to the WFCM algorithm, the classification performance of the WFCM algorithm is further enhanced and the convergent speed of objective function is further accelerated.

Fuzzy c-means (FCM) algorithms have been shown effective for image segmentation. A series of enhanced FCM algorithms incorporating spatial information have been developed for reducing the effect of noises. This paper presents a robust FCM algorithm with non-local spatial information for image segmentation, termed as NLFCM. It incorporates two factors: one is the local similarity measure depending on the differences between the central pixel and its neighboring pixels in the image; the other is the non-local similarity measure depended on all pixels whose neighborhood configurations are similar to their neighborhood pixels. Furthermore, an adaptive weight is introduced to control the trade-off between local similarity measure and non-local similarity measure. The experimental results on synthetic images and real images under different types of noises show that the new algorithm is effective, and they are relatively independent to the types of noises.

The traditional Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) algorithm has some disadvantages in optimization method, which makes the algorithm liable to fall into local optimum, thus failing to get the optimal clustering results. According to the defect of FCM algorithm, a new Fuzzy Clustering algorithm based on Chaos Optimization (FCCO) is proposed in this paper, which combines mutative scale chaos optimization strategy and gradient method together. Moreover, a fuzzy cluster validity index (PBMF) is introduced to make the FCCO algorithm capable of clustering automatically. Three other fuzzy cluster validity indices, namely XB, PC and PE, are utilized to compare the performances of FCCO, FCM and another algorithm, when applied to artificial and real data sets classification. Experiment results show FCCO algorithm is more likely to obtain the global optimum and achieve better performances on validity indices than other algorithms.

This paper shows that a choice of weights in the fuzzy c-means algorithm affect the performance of a room equalizer. The ordinary fuzzy c-means (FCM) algorithm already proves useful to deriving an equalizing filter for multiple listeners. A room impulse response models the behaviour of the sounds reflection in the room at each listener location. The FCM algorithm finds similar room impulse responses based on Euclidean distances among the impulse responses and groups them together. But the Euclidean distance used in the FCM implies equal weights for all parts of sound reverberation or reflection. The paper proposes an algorithm to obtain a room acoustic equalization filter based on weighted fuzzy c-means (WFCM) algorithm. The use of WFCM can give clustering more flexibility in obtaining a prototype for each cluster. Then combining the prototypes to obtain a representative room response that derives the inverse filter will be more effective. We use spectral deviation to measure how well each equalizing filter works. Experiments show that different weights in the WFCM algorithm can enhance or degrade the performance of the equalizing filter.

In this paper, a clustering algorithm based on the fuzzy c-means algorithm (FCM) and the gradient descent method is presented. In the FCM, the minimization process of the objective function is proceeded by solving two equations alternatively in an iterative fashion. Each iteration requires the use of all the data at once. In our proposed approach one datum at a time is presented to the network, and the minimization is proceeded using the gradient descent method. Compared to FCM, the experimental results show that our algorithm is very competitive in terms of speed and stability of convergence for large number of data. >