Semi-supervised fuzzy clustering algorithm based on prior membership degree matrix with expert preference

• Published in: Expert systems with applications 2024-03, Vol.238, p.121812, Article 121812
• Main Authors: Xu, Shengbing, Hao, Zhifeng, Zhu, Yuanhao, Wang, Zhenyou, Xiao, Yunhao, Liu, Bo
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Constraints; Fuzzy clustering; Missing value; Prior membership degree; Semi-supervised clustering
• ISSN: 0957-4174; 1873-6793
• DOI: 10.1016/j.eswa.2023.121812

Existing pre-processing methods for the prior membership degree matrix suffer from the following issues: (1) The labeling constraints for prior membership degree matrix have an effect on the expert’s judgment on the prior membership degree, which easily causes the distortion problem of the prior membership degree labeling information; (2) There exists the problem of inconsistency between the filling information and the labeling information in the prior membership degree matrix to be filled in the missing values with zeros. To address these problems, we propose an unconstrained labeling idea for the prior membership degree matrix and the corresponding pre-processing method for the missing values by introducing the statistical characteristics of extreme value distribution and simultaneously apply it to the semi-supervised fuzzy clustering algorithm. More specifically, we focus on learning an expert preference value from the prior membership degree matrix and filling in the missing values with the expert preference value. Thus, we propose an unconstrained pre-processing method for the prior membership degree matrix by filling in missing values with an expert preference to keep the filling information consistent with the labeling information in the prior membership degree matrix as much as possible. In addition, we design a semi-supervised fuzzy clustering algorithm based on an unconstrained prior membership degree matrix with expert preference (SFCM-EP) by introducing the K-L divergence to improve the applicability, utility and running performance of semi-supervised fuzzy clustering algorithm. Our experimental results on the simulation dataset and the UCI datasets show the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed pre-processing method of the prior membership degree matrix with encouraging results.