Fuzzy clustering with Minkowski distance functions

Distances in the well known fuzzy c-means algorithm of Bezdek (1973) are measured by the squared Euclidean distance. Other distances have been used as well in fuzzy clustering. For example, Jajuga (1991) proposed to use the L1-distance and Bobrowski and Bezdek (1991) also used the L∞-distance. For the more general case of Minkowski distance and the case of using a root of the squared Minkowski distance, Groenen and Jajuga (2001) introduced a majorization algorithm to minimize the error. One of the advantages of iterative majorization is that it is a guaranteed descent algorithm, so that every iteration reduces the error until convergence is reached. However, their algorithm was limited to the case of Minkowski parameter between 1 and 2, that is, between the L1-distance and the Euclidean distance. Here, we extend their majorization algorithm to any Minkowski distance with Minkowski parameter greater than (or equal to) 1. This extension also includes the case of the L∞-distance. We also investigate how well this algorithm performs and present an empirical application.