Accelerating fuzzy clustering

This paper extends earlier work [C. Borgelt, R. Kruse, Speeding up fuzzy clustering with neural network techniques, in: Proceedings of the 12th IEEE International Conference on Fuzzy Systems (FUZZ-IEEE’03, St. Louis, MO, USA), IEEE Press, Piscataway, NJ, USA, 2003] on an approach to accelerate fuzzy clustering by transferring methods that were originally developed to speed up the training process of (artificial) neural networks. The core idea is to consider the difference between two consecutive steps of the alternating optimization scheme of fuzzy clustering as providing a gradient. This “gradient” may then be modified in the same way as a gradient is modified in error backpropagation in order to enhance the training. Even though these modifications are, in principle, directly applicable, carefully checking and bounding the update steps can improve the performance and can make the procedure more robust. In addition, this paper provides a new and much more detailed experimental evaluation that is based on fuzzy cluster comparison measures [C. Borgelt, Resampling for fuzzy clustering, Int. J. Uncertainty, Fuzziness Knowledge-based Syst. 15 (5) (2007), 595–614], which can be used nicely to study the convergence speed.