A Novel Fuzzy c-Means Clustering Algorithm Using Adaptive Norm

The fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering algorithm is an unsupervised learning method that has been widely applied to cluster unlabeled data automatically instead of artificially, but is sensitive to noisy observations due to its inappropriate treatment of noise in the data. In this paper, a novel method considering noise intelligently based on the existing FCM approach, called adaptive-FCM and its extended version (adaptive-REFCM) in combination with relative entropy, are proposed. Adaptive-FCM, relying on an inventive integration of the adaptive norm, benefits from a robust overall structure. Adaptive-REFCM further integrates the properties of the relative entropy and normalized distance to preserve the global details of the dataset. Several experiments are carried out, including noisy or noise-free University of California Irvine (UCI) clustering and image segmentation experiments. The results show that adaptive-REFCM exhibits better noise robustness and adaptive adjustment in comparison with relevant state-of-the-art FCM methods.