An Overview of Unsupervised and Semi-Supervised Fuzzy Kernel Clustering

For real-world clustering tasks, the input data is typically not easily separable due to the highly complex data structure or when clusters vary in size, density and shape. Kernel-based clustering has proven to be an effective approach to partition such data. In this paper, we provide an overview of several fuzzy kernel clustering algorithms. We focus on methods that optimize an fuzzy C-mean-type objective function. We highlight the advantages and disadvantages of each method. In addition to the completely unsupervised algorithms, we also provide an overview of some semi-supervised fuzzy kernel clustering algorithms. These algorithms use partial supervision information to guide the optimization process and avoid local minima. We also provide an overview of the different approaches that have been used to extend kernel clustering to handle very large data sets.