TECM: Transfer learning-based evidential c-means clustering

Abstract

As a representative evidential clustering algorithm, evidential c-means (ECM) provides a deeper insight into the data by allowing an object to belong not only to a single class, but also to any subset of a collection of classes, which generalizes the hard, fuzzy, possibilistic, and rough partitions. However, compared with other partition-based algorithms, ECM must estimate numerous additional parameters, and thus insufficient or contaminated data will have a greater influence on its clustering performance. To solve this problem, in this study, a transfer learning-based ECM (TECM) algorithm is proposed by introducing the strategy of transfer learning into the process of evidential clustering. The TECM objective function is constructed by integrating the knowledge learned from the source domain with the data in the target domain to cluster the target data. Subsequently, an alternate optimization scheme is developed to solve the constraint objective function of the TECM algorithm. The proposed TECM algorithm is applicable to cases where the source and target domains have the same or different numbers of clusters. A series of experiments were conducted on both synthetic and real datasets, and the experimental results demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed TECM algorithm compared to ECM and other representative multitask or transfer-clustering algorithms.