Soft subspace clustering with an improved feature weight self-adjustment mechanism

Traditional clustering algorithms are often defeated by high dimensionality. In order to find clusters hiding in different subspaces, soft subspace clustering has become an effective means of dealing with high dimensional data. However, most existing soft subspace clustering algorithms contain parameters which are difficult to be determined by users in real-world applications. A new soft subspace clustering algorithm named SC-IFWSA is proposed, which uses an improved feature weight self-adjustment mechanism IFWSA to update adaptively the weights of all features for each cluster according to the importance of the features to clustering quality and does not require users to set any parameter values. In addition, SC-IFWSA can overcome the traditional FWSA mechanism which may fail to calculate feature weights in some particular cases. In comparison with its related approaches, the experimental results carried out on ten data sets demonstrate the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed method.