Incorporating prototypes into Horizontal Collaborative Fuzzy C-Means

Collaborative fuzzy clustering concerns a process of revealing a structure of a given dataset, which is common or similar to a number of outer datasets, and the collaborative information is transmitted by some media (say partition matrix or prototypes) for the sake of the safety and personal privacy of data. In Horizontal Collaborative Fuzzy C-Means (HC-FCM), the dataset and the outer datasets are all about a same group of patterns but given in different feature spaces, and the tool for transmitting collaborative information is partition matrix. Thus, we can call it partition matrix-based HC-FCM. In this study, we introduce the prototypes into HC-FCM resulting in the partition matrix and prototype-based HC-FCM where the collaborative information is transmitted by both partition matrix and prototypes. Meanwhile we give the prototype-based HC-FCM algorithm where the collaborative information is transmitted by prototypes. We not only discuss the new versions of HC-FCM but also do the comparisons among them. The difference among these algorithms (FCM, partition matrix-based HC-FCM, prototype-based HC-FCM, partition matrix and prototype-based HC-FCM) were visualized in the experiments. Good performances of the new algorithm are revealed there.