A Partitioning Fuzzy Clustering Algorithm for Symbolic Interval Data based on Adaptive Mahalanobis Distances

The recording of symbolic interval data has become a common practice with the recent advances in database technologies. This paper introduces a fuzzy clustering algorithm to partitioning symbolic interval data. The proposed method furnish a fuzzy partition and a prototype (a vector of intervals) for each cluster by optimizing an adequacy criterion that measures the fitting between the clusters and their representatives. To compare symbolic interval data, the method use a suitable adaptive Mahalanobis disance defined on vectors of intervals. Experiments with real and synthetic symbolic interval data sets showed the usefulness of the proposed method.