Fuzzy C-means clustering with hesitant fuzzy linguistic preference relation

Abstract

With the advancement of technology and growing social demand, large scale group decision making has gained significant importance in the field of decision making. Clustering analysis plays a crucial role in enhancing the efficiency of large scale group decision making processes. Linguistic evaluation is more in line with people’s cognitive and expressive habits. The hesitant fuzzy linguistic term set (HFLTS) offers more flexibility in expressing evaluation information. This paper is dedicated to designing a fuzzy C-means clustering model that is specifically applicable for the hesitant fuzzy linguistic preference relation (HFLPR). The objective function of the model is built based on the dissimilarity between HFLPRs and the initial cluster centers to obtain the fuzzy membership matrix and cluster centers. Since initializing cluster centers is a crucial step to produce a reasonable cluster result, three methods are proposed for generating initial centers for HFLPRs. The first and second methods are improvements over existing approaches that dealt with the clustering problem with numerical values. The third approach considers both the preference relation of preferring an alternative and the distribution of the actual preference relations. Based on this, a fuzzy C-means clustering algorithm with HFLPR is designed to obtain the cluster centers and membership matrix for there types of initializing clustering centers. Finally, based on the quality and speed of clustering, a numerical example and comparative analyses illustrate that the proposed clustering algorithm is efficient and effective.