Di Martino, F.; Sessa, S. A New Validity Index Based on Fuzzy Energy and Fuzzy Entropy Measures in Fuzzy Clustering Problems. Entropy2020, 22, 1200.
Di Martino, F.; Sessa, S. A New Validity Index Based on Fuzzy Energy and Fuzzy Entropy Measures in Fuzzy Clustering Problems. Entropy 2020, 22, 1200.
Di Martino, F.; Sessa, S. A New Validity Index Based on Fuzzy Energy and Fuzzy Entropy Measures in Fuzzy Clustering Problems. Entropy2020, 22, 1200.
Di Martino, F.; Sessa, S. A New Validity Index Based on Fuzzy Energy and Fuzzy Entropy Measures in Fuzzy Clustering Problems. Entropy 2020, 22, 1200.
Abstract
Two well-known drawbacks in fuzzy clustering are the requirement of assign in advance the number of clusters and random initialization of cluster centers.; the quality of the final fuzzy clusters depends heavily on the initial choice of the number of clusters and the initialization of the clusters, then it is necessary to apply a validity index to measure the compactness and the separability of the final clusters and run the clustering algorithm several times. We propose a new fuzzy C-means algorithm in which a validity index based on the concepts of maximum fuzzy energy and minimum fuzzy entropy is applied to initialize the cluster centers and to find the optimal number of clusters and initial cluster centers in order to obtain a good clustering quality, without increasing time consumption. We test our algorithm on UCI machine learning classification datasets comparing the results with the ones obtained by using well-known validity indices and variations of FCM using optimization algorithms in the initialization phase. The comparison results show that our algorithm represents an optimal trade-off between the quality of clustering and the time consumption.
Keywords
FCM; validity index; fuzzy energy; fuzzy entropy
Subject
Computer Science and Mathematics, Information Systems
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
