Elite fuzzy clustering ensemble based on clustering diversity and quality measures

In spite of some attempts at improving the quality of the clustering ensemble methods, it seems that little research has been devoted to the selection procedure within the fuzzy clustering ensemble. In addition, quality and local diversity of base-clusterings are two important factors in the selection of base-clusterings. Very few of the studies have considered these two factors together for selecting the best fuzzy base-clusterings in the ensemble. We propose a novel fuzzy clustering ensemble framework based on a new fuzzy diversity measure and a fuzzy quality measure to find the base-clusterings with the best performance. Diversity and quality are defined based on the fuzzy normalized mutual information between fuzzy base-clusterings. In our framework, the final clustering of selected base-clusterings is obtained by two types of consensus functions: (1) a fuzzy co-association matrix is constructed from the selected base-clusterings and then, a single traditional clustering such as hierarchical agglomerative clustering is applied as consensus function over the matrix to construct the final clustering. (2) a new graph based fuzzy consensus function. The time complexity of the proposed consensus function is linear in terms of the number of data-objects. Experimental results reveal the effectiveness of the proposed approach compared to the state-of-the-art methods in terms of evaluation criteria on various standard datasets. © 2018, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature