Fuzzy Cluster Analysis of Larger Data Sets

The application of fuzzy cluster analysis to larger data sets can cause runtime and memory overflow problems. While deterministic or hard clustering assigns a data object to a unique cluster, fuzzy clustering distributes the membership of a data object over different clusters. In standard fuzzy clustering, membership degrees will (almost) never become zero, so that all data objects are assigned to − even with very small membership degrees − all clusters. As a consequence, this does not only demand higher computational and memory power, it also leads to the undesired effect that all data objects will always influence all clusters, no matter how far away they are from a cluster. New approaches, modifying the idea of the fuzzifier, have been developed to avoid the problem of nonzero membership degrees for all data and clusters. In this paper, these ideas will be combined with concepts of speeding up fuzzy clustering by a suitable data organization, so that fuzzy clustering can be applied more efficiently to larger data sets.