Information Theoretic Weighted Fuzzy Clustering Ensemble

Abstract

In order to improve performance and robustness of clustering, it is proposed to generate and aggregate a number of primary clusters via clustering ensemble technique. Fuzzy clustering ensemble approaches attempt to improve the performance of fuzzy clustering tasks. However, in these approaches, cluster (or clustering) reliability has not paid much attention to. Ignoring cluster (or clustering) reliability makes these approaches weak in dealing with low-quality base clustering methods. In this paper, we have utilized cluster unreliability estimation and local weighting strategy to propose a new fuzzy clustering ensemble method which has introduced Reliability Based weighted co-association matrix Fuzzy C-Means (RBFCM), Reliability Based Graph Partitioning (RBGP) and Reliability Based Hyper Clustering (RBHC) as three new fuzzy clustering consensus functions. Our fuzzy clustering ensemble approach works based on fuzzy cluster unreliability estimation. Cluster unreliability is estimated according to an entropic criterion using the cluster labels in the entire ensemble. To do so, the new metric is defined to estimate the fuzzy cluster unreliability; then, the reliability value of any cluster is determined using a Reliability Driven Cluster Indicator (RDCI). The time complexities of RBHC and RBGP are linearly proportional with the number of data objects. Performance and robustness of the proposed method are experimentally evaluated for some benchmark datasets. The experimental results demonstrate efficiency and suitability of the proposed method.