Application Of Fuzzy C-means Clustering Research Articles

Application of fuzzy C-means clustering and fuzzy EDAS to assess groundwater irrigation suitability and prioritization for agricultural development in a complex hydrogeological basin.

The current research is focused on detecting a river basin suitable for agriculture and priority for management using a new clustering tool of groundwater quality with fuzzy logic technique in R and Geographical Information System. A new fuzzy clustering-soft computing technique has been executed to determine the different hydrochemical zones considering 13 essential parameters such as electrical conductivity, hardness, chloride, sodium adsorption ratio, residual sodium carbonate, soluble sodium percent, magnesium hazard, permeability index, potential salinity, residual sodium bicarbonate, Kelly's ratio, synthetic harmful coefficient, and exchangeable sodium percentage. The derived fuzzy C-mean clustering (FCM) outperformed other available hard computing techniques like hierarchical clustering, K-means clustering, and agglomerative clustering. It divided the sampling sites into 2 clustering groups (FCM I and FCM II) which has been validated using fuzzy silhouette index (0.85), the partition coefficient (0.76), the partial entropy (0.68), and the modified partition coefficient (0.52). The hydrogeochemical analysis confirmed that the rock-water interaction, chemical weathering, and ion exchange process are predominant in the aquifer system of the study area. According to the correlation plots, the studied groundwater samples largely evolved from [Formula: see text], mixed [Formula: see text] types, and [Formula: see text] types. The spatial distribution map and the hydrochemical analysis also gives a clear depiction of the fluoride (> 1.0mg/l) and high iron (> 0.3mg/l) contamination in groundwater quality, making it unsuitable for both drinking and irrigation. A fuzzy EDAS priority map has been prepared based on all the irrigation suitability parameters which concludes that the groundwater at the upstream and downstream section of the basin requires the most attention. Based on the highest priority for management, five zones have been delineated: very high (5.98%), high (22.31%), medium (16.39%), low (32.30%), and very low (23.02). The findings of this study will be beneficial to planners and policymakers as they can develop schemes to solve similar problems across the country.

Application of Fuzzy c-Means Clustering in Data Analysis of Metabolomics

Fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering is an unsupervised method derived from fuzzy logic that is suitable for solving multiclass and ambiguous clustering problems. In this study, FCM clustering is applied to cluster metabolomics data. FCM is performed directly on the data matrix to generate a membership matrix which represents the degree of association the samples have with each cluster. The method is parametrized with the number of clusters (C) and the fuzziness coefficient (m), which denotes the degree of fuzziness in the algorithm. Both have been optimized by combining FCM with partial least-squares (PLS) using the membership matrix as the Y matrix in the PLS model. The quality parameters R(2)Y and Q(2) of the PLS model have been used to monitor and optimize C and m. Data of metabolic profiles from three gene types of Escherichia coli were used to demonstrate the method above. Different multivariable analysis methods have been compared. Principal component analysis failed to model the metabolite data, while partial least-squares discriminant analysis yielded results with overfitting. On the basis of the optimized parameters, the FCM was able to reveal main phenotype changes and individual characters of three gene types of E. coli. Coupled with PLS, FCM provides a powerful research tool for metabolomics with improved visualization, accurate classification, and outlier estimation.

AN EMPIRICAL ASSESSMENT OF THE OPTIMUM CURRENCY AREAS THEORY: TURKEY AND THE EMU COUNTRIES

This study aims to analyze Turkey and the EMU countries in the light of criteria suggested by the optimum currency areas (OCA) theory and the Maastricht criteria. To this end, we follow a novel approach with an application of fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering. The results show that the application of FCM clustering to the OCA criteria produces better clustering structure compared to the Maastricht criteria. In addition, in the analysis with the Maastricht criteria, the control group countries, Canada and Japan, are not distinguished from the European countries. Furthermore, Turkey remains as a separate group than the European countries with respect to both the OCA criteria and the Maastricht criteria.