Graph-Based Multiprototype Competitive Learning and Its Applications

Partitioning nonlinearly separable datasets is a basic problem that is associated with data clustering. In this paper, a novel approach that is termed graph-based multiprototype competitive learning (GMPCL) is proposed to handle this problem. A graph-based method is employed to produce an initial, coarse clustering. After that, a multiprototype competitive learning is introduced to refine the coarse clustering and discover clusters of an arbitrary shape. The GMPCL algorithm is further extended to deal with high-dimensional data clustering, i.e., the fast graph-based multiprototype competitive learning (FGMPCL) algorithm. An experimental comparison has been performed by the exploitation of both synthetic and real-world datasets to validate the effectiveness of the proposed methods. Additionally, we apply our GMPCL/FGMPCL to two computer-vision tasks, namely, automatic color image segmentation and video clustering. Experimental results show that GMPCL/FGMPCL provide an effective and efficient tool with application to computer vision.