Possibilistic and fuzzy clustering methods for robust analysis of non-precise data

This work focuses on robust clustering of data affected by imprecision. The imprecision is managed in terms of fuzzy sets. The clustering process is based on the fuzzy and possibilistic approaches. In both approaches the observations are assigned to the clusters by means of membership degrees. In fuzzy clustering the membership degrees express the degrees of sharing of the observations to the clusters. In contrast, in possibilistic clustering the membership degrees are degrees of typicality. These two sources of information are complementary because the former helps to discover the best fuzzy partition of the observations while the latter reflects how well the observations are described by the centroids and, therefore, is helpful to identify outliers. First, a fully possibilistic k-means clustering procedure is suggested. Then, in order to exploit the benefits of both the approaches, a joint possibilistic and fuzzy clustering method for fuzzy data is proposed. A selection procedure for choosing the parameters of the new clustering method is introduced. The effectiveness of the proposal is investigated by means of simulated and real-life data

A possibilistic approach to latent structure analysis for symmetric fuzzy data.

In many situations the available amount of data is huge and can be intractable. When the data set is single valued, latent structure models are recognized techniques, which provide a useful compression of the information. This is done by considering a regression model between observed and unobserved (latent) fuzzy variables. In this paper, an extension of latent structure analysis to deal with fuzzy data is proposed. Our extension follows the possibilistic approach, widely used both in the cluster and regression frameworks. In this case, the possibilistic approach involves the formulation of a latent structure analysis for fuzzy data by optimization. Specifically, a non-linear programming problem in which the fuzziness of the model is minimized is introduced. In order to show how our model works, the results of two applications are given.Latent structure analysis, symmetric fuzzy data set, possibilistic approach.

Possibilistic clustering for shape recognition

Clustering methods have been used extensively in computer vision and pattern recognition. Fuzzy clustering has been shown to be advantageous over crisp (or traditional) clustering in that total commitment of a vector to a given class is not required at each iteration. Recently fuzzy clustering methods have shown spectacular ability to detect not only hypervolume clusters, but also clusters which are actually 'thin shells', i.e., curves and surfaces. Most analytic fuzzy clustering approaches are derived from Bezdek's Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) algorithm. The FCM uses the probabilistic constraint that the memberships of a data point across classes sum to one. This constraint was used to generate the membership update equations for an iterative algorithm. Unfortunately, the memberships resulting from FCM and its derivatives do not correspond to the intuitive concept of degree of belonging, and moreover, the algorithms have considerable trouble in noisy environments. Recently, we cast the clustering problem into the framework of possibility theory. Our approach was radically different from the existing clustering methods in that the resulting partition of the data can be interpreted as a possibilistic partition, and the membership values may be interpreted as degrees of possibility of the points belonging to the classes. We constructed an appropriate objective function whose minimum will characterize a good possibilistic partition of the data, and we derived the membership and prototype update equations from necessary conditions for minimization of our criterion function. In this paper, we show the ability of this approach to detect linear and quartic curves in the presence of considerable noise

Dealing with non-metric dissimilarities in fuzzy central clustering algorithms

Clustering is the problem of grouping objects on the basis of a similarity measure among them. Relational clustering methods can be employed when a feature-based representation of the objects is not available, and their description is given in terms of pairwise (dis)similarities. This paper focuses on the relational duals of fuzzy central clustering algorithms, and their application in situations when patterns are represented by means of non-metric pairwise dissimilarities. Symmetrization and shift operations have been proposed to transform the dissimilarities among patterns from non-metric to metric. In this paper, we analyze how four popular fuzzy central clustering algorithms are affected by such transformations. The main contributions include the lack of invariance to shift operations, as well as the invariance to symmetrization. Moreover, we highlight the connections between relational duals of central clustering algorithms and central clustering algorithms in kernel-induced spaces. One among the presented algorithms has never been proposed for non-metric relational clustering, and turns out to be very robust to shift operations. (C) 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

Certainty of outlier and boundary points processing in data mining

Data certainty is one of the issues in the real-world applications which is caused by unwanted noise in data. Recently, more attentions have been paid to overcome this problem. We proposed a new method based on neutrosophic set (NS) theory to detect boundary and outlier points as challenging points in clustering methods. Generally, firstly, a certainty value is assigned to data points based on the proposed definition in NS. Then, certainty set is presented for the proposed cost function in NS domain by considering a set of main clusters and noise cluster. After that, the proposed cost function is minimized by gradient descent method. Data points are clustered based on their membership degrees. Outlier points are assigned to noise cluster and boundary points are assigned to main clusters with almost same membership degrees. To show the effectiveness of the proposed method, two types of datasets including 3 datasets in Scatter type and 4 datasets in UCI type are used. Results demonstrate that the proposed cost function handles boundary and outlier points with more accurate membership degrees and outperforms existing state of the art clustering methods.Comment: Conference Paper, 6 page

Uncertainty Analysis of the Adequacy Assessment Model of a Distributed Generation System

Due to the inherent aleatory uncertainties in renewable generators, the reliability/adequacy assessments of distributed generation (DG) systems have been particularly focused on the probabilistic modeling of random behaviors, given sufficient informative data. However, another type of uncertainty (epistemic uncertainty) must be accounted for in the modeling, due to incomplete knowledge of the phenomena and imprecise evaluation of the related characteristic parameters. In circumstances of few informative data, this type of uncertainty calls for alternative methods of representation, propagation, analysis and interpretation. In this study, we make a first attempt to identify, model, and jointly propagate aleatory and epistemic uncertainties in the context of DG systems modeling for adequacy assessment. Probability and possibility distributions are used to model the aleatory and epistemic uncertainties, respectively. Evidence theory is used to incorporate the two uncertainties under a single framework. Based on the plausibility and belief functions of evidence theory, the hybrid propagation approach is introduced. A demonstration is given on a DG system adapted from the IEEE 34 nodes distribution test feeder. Compared to the pure probabilistic approach, it is shown that the hybrid propagation is capable of explicitly expressing the imprecision in the knowledge on the DG parameters into the final adequacy values assessed. It also effectively captures the growth of uncertainties with higher DG penetration levels

A fuzzy clustering algorithm to detect planar and quadric shapes

In this paper, we introduce a new fuzzy clustering algorithm to detect an unknown number of planar and quadric shapes in noisy data. The proposed algorithm is computationally and implementationally simple, and it overcomes many of the drawbacks of the existing algorithms that have been proposed for similar tasks. Since the clustering is performed in the original image space, and since no features need to be computed, this approach is particularly suited for sparse data. The algorithm may also be used in pattern recognition applications