Enhancement of the classification and reconstruction performance of fuzzy C-means with refinements of prototypes

Abstract Owning to their abilities to reveal structural relationships in data, fuzzy clustering plays a pivotal role in fuzzy modeling, pattern recognition, and data analysis. As supporting an unsupervised mode of learning, fuzzy clustering, brings about unique opportunities to build a structural backbone of numerous constructs in the areas identified above. A follow-up phase is required when the structural findings developed in the form of fuzzy clusters need some refinements, usually when the clustering results are used afterwards in the model being developed in a supervised mode. Following this general line of thought, in this study we propose a novel approach to optimize the clustering and classification performance of the Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) algorithm. Proceeding with a collection of clusters (information granules) produced by the FCM, we carry out the refinements of the results (in order to improve the representation or classification capabilities of fuzzy clusters) by adjusting a location of the prototypes so that a certain performance index becomes optimized. At this phase, the optimization is carried out in a supervised mode with the aid of Differential Evolution (DE). We propose five different strategies to adjust a location of the prototypes. Experimental studies completed on synthetic data and publicly available real-world data quantify the improvement of the representation and classification abilities of the clustering method.