DPC-FSC: An approach of fuzzy semantic cells to density peaks clustering

Abstract

Density peaks clustering (DPC) algorithm is a succinct and efficient density-based clustering approach to data analysis. It computes the local density and the relative distance for objects to seek cluster centers and form clusters. However, it is difficult to estimate an appropriate local density by a rule of thumb; therefore, the performance of DPC may be poor on real datasets in practice. Thus, this study proposes a novel method for density peaks clustering based on fuzzy semantic cells. Specifically, each object is coarsened into a fuzzy point with the form of the fuzzy semantic cell model. Based on this model, a local density metric is defined and estimated via the principle of justifiable granularity. Our local density estimation can be converted into an optimization problem. In addition, a relative semantic distance is also introduced which concerns the distance between fuzzy semantic cells. The relative semantic distance is more informative for selecting cluster centers in the decision graph. The experimental results show that our method not only exhibits higher performance but also provides a clearer decision graph to select cluster centers.