Possibilistic Exponential Fuzzy Clustering

Generally, abnormal points (noise and outliers) cause cluster analysis to produce low accuracy especially in fuzzy clustering. These data not only stay in clusters but also deviate the centroids from their true positions. Traditional fuzzy clustering like Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) always assigns data to all clusters which is not reasonable in some circumstances. By reformulating objective function in exponential equation, the algorithm aggressively selects data into the clusters. However noisy data and outliers cannot be properly handled by clustering process therefore they are forced to be included in a cluster because of a general probabilistic constraint that the sum of the membership degrees across all clusters is one. In order to improve this weakness, possibilistic approach relaxes this condition to improve membership assignment. Nevertheless, possibilistic clustering algorithms generally suffer from coincident clusters because their membership equations ignore the distance to other clusters. Although there are some possibilistic clustering approaches that do not generate coincident clusters, most of them require the right combination of multiple parameters for the algorithms to work. In this paper, we theoretically study Possibilistic Exponential Fuzzy Clustering (PXFCM) that integrates possibilistic approach with exponential fuzzy clustering. PXFCM has only one parameter and not only partitions the data but also filters noisy data or detects them as outliers. The comprehensive experiments show that PXFCM produces high accuracy in both clustering results and outlier detection without generating coincident problems.