Fuzzy clustering involving convex polytopes

Prototype based methods are commonly used in cluster analysis and the results may be highly dependent on the prototype used. In this paper, we propose a fuzzy clustering method that involves adaptively expanding convex polytopes. Thus, the dependency on the use of prototypes can be eliminated. Also, the proposed method makes it possible to effectively represent an arbitrarily distributed data set without a priori knowledge of the number of clusters in the data set. Specifically, nonlinear membership functions are utilized to determine whether a new cluster is created or which vertex of the cluster should be expanded. For this, the membership function of a new vertex is assigned according to not only a distance measure between an incoming pattern vector and a current vertex, but also the amount of how much the current vertex has been modified. Therefore, cluster expansion can be only allowed for one cluster per incoming pattern. Several experimental results are given to show the validity of our method