On Various Types of Even-Sized Clustering Based on Optimization

Clustering is a very useful tool of data mining. A clustering method which is referred to as K-member clustering is to classify a dataset into some clusters of which the size is more than a given constant K. The K-member clustering is useful and it is applied to many applications. Naturally, clustering methods to classify a dataset into some even-sized clusters can be considered and some even-sized clustering methods have been proposed. However, conventional even-sized clustering methods often output inadequate results. One of the reasons is that they are not based on optimization. Therefore, we proposed Even-sized Clustering Based on Optimization (ECBO) in our previous study. The simplex method is used to calculate the belongingness of each object to clusters in ECBO. In this study, ECBO is extended by introducing some ideas which were introduced in k-means or fuzzy c-means to improve problems of initial-value dependence, robustness against outliers, calculation cost, and nonlinear boundaries of clusters. Moreover, we reconsider the relation between the dataset size, the cluster number, and K in ECBO.