Mining fuzzy frequent itemsets for hierarchical document clustering

As text documents are explosively increasing in the Internet, the process of hierarchical document clustering has been proven to be useful for grouping similar documents for versatile applications. However, most document clustering methods still suffer from challenges in dealing with the problems of high dimensionality, scalability, accuracy, and meaningful cluster labels. In this paper, we will present an effective Fuzzy Frequent Itemset-Based Hierarchical Clustering (F2IHC) approach, which uses fuzzy association rule mining algorithm to improve the clustering accuracy of Frequent Itemset-Based Hierarchical Clustering (FIHC) method. In our approach, the key terms will be extracted from the document set, and each document is pre-processed into the designated representation for the following mining process. Then, a fuzzy association rule mining algorithm for text is employed to discover a set of highly-related fuzzy frequent itemsets, which contain key terms to be regarded as the labels of the candidate clusters. Finally, these documents will be clustered into a hierarchical cluster tree by referring to these candidate clusters. We have conducted experiments to evaluate the performance based on Classic4, Hitech, Re0, Reuters, and Wap datasets. The experimental results show that our approach not only absolutely retains the merits of FIHC, but also improves the accuracy quality of FIHC.