Towards Finding a New Kernelized Fuzzy C-means Clustering Algorithm

Kernelized Fuzzy C-Means clustering technique is an attempt to improve the performance of the conventional Fuzzy C-Means clustering technique. Recently this technique where a kernel-induced distance function is used as a similarity measure instead of a Euclidean distance which is used in the conventional Fuzzy C-Means clustering technique, has earned popularity among research community. Like the conventional Fuzzy C-Means clustering technique this technique also suffers from inconsistency in its performance due to the fact that here also the initial centroids are obtained based on the randomly initialized membership values of the objects. Our present work proposes a new method where we have applied the Subtractive clustering technique of Chiu as a preprocessor to Kernelized Fuzzy CMeans clustering technique. With this new method we have tried not only to remove the inconsistency of Kernelized Fuzzy C-Means clustering technique but also to deal with the situations where the number of clusters is not predetermined. We have also provided a comparison of our method with the Subtractive clustering technique of Chiu and Kernelized Fuzzy C-Means clustering technique using two validity measures namely Partition Coefficient and Clustering Entropy.