Fuzzy Density Peaks Clustering

As an exemplar-based clustering method, the well-known density peaks clustering (DPC) heavily depends on the computation of kernel-based density peaks, which incurs two issues: first, whether kernel-based density can facilitate a large variety of data well, including cases where ambiguity and uncertainty of the assignment of the data points to their clusters may exist, and second, whether the concept of density peaks can be interpreted and manipulated from the perspective of soft partitions (e.g., fuzzy partitions) to achieve enhanced clustering performance. In this article, in order to provide flexible adaptability for tackling ambiguity and uncertainty in clustering, a new concept of fuzzy peaks is proposed to express the density of a data point as the fuzzy-operator-based coupling of the fuzzy distances between a data point and its neighbors. As a fuzzy variant of DPC, a novel fuzzy density peaks clustering (FDPC) method FDPC based on fuzzy operators (especially S-norm operators) is accordingly devised along with the same algorithmic framework of DPC. With an appropriate choice of a fuzzy operator with its associated tunable parameter for a clustering task, FDPC can indeed inherit the advantage of fuzzy partitions and simultaneously provide flexibility in enhancing clustering performance. The experimental results on both synthetic and real data sets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms or at least remains comparable to the comparative methods in clustering performance by choosing appropriate parameters in most cases.

Automated summary

The proposed fuzzy density peaks clustering (FDPC) method introduces the concept of fuzzy peaks to address ambiguity and uncertainty in clustering, achieving more flexible clustering performance enhancement. Experimental results demonstrate that, by selecting appropriate parameters in most cases, the method outperforms or remains comparable to comparative methods in clustering performance.