Fuzzy Technique-based Identification of Close and Distant Clusters in Clustering

Due to advances in hardware performance, user-friendly interfaces are becoming one of the major concerns in information systems. Linguistic conversation is a very natural way of human communications. Fuzzy techniques have been employed to liaison the discrepancy between the qualitative linguistic terms and quantitative computerized data. This paper deals with linguistic queries using clustering results on data sets, which are intended to retrieve the close clusters or distant clusters from the clustering results. In order to support such queries, a fuzzy technique-based method is proposed. The method introduces distance membership functions, namely, close and distant membership functions which transform the metric distance between two objects into the degree of closeness or farness, respectively. In order to measure the degree of closeness or farness between two clusters, both cluster closeness measure and cluster farness measure which incorporate distance membership function and cluster memberships are considered. For the flexibility of clustering, fuzzy clusters are assumed to be formed. This allows us to linguistically query close or distant clusters by constructing fuzzy relation based on the measures.