A relational fuzzy c-means clustering algorithm based on multiple dissimilarity matrices

Abstract

This paper introduces a relational fuzzy c-means clustering algorithm that is able to partition objects taking into account simultaneously several dissimilarity matrices. The aim is to obtain a collaborative role of the different dissimilarity matrices in order to obtain a final consensus partition. These matrices could have been obtained using different sets of variables and dissimilarity functions. This algorithm is designed to give a fuzzy partition and a prototype for each cluster as well as to learn a relevance weight for each dissimilarity matrix by optimizing an objective function. These relevance weights change at each algorithm's iteration and are different from one cluster to another. Experiments with datasets from UCI machine learning repository show the usefulness of the proposed algorithm.