Fuzzy Cluster Analysis with Cluster Repulsion

We explore an approach to possibilistic fuzzy c-means clustering that avoids a severe drawback of the conventional approach, namely that the objective function is truly minimized only if all cluster centers are identical. Our approach is based on the idea that this undesired property can be avoided if we introduce a mutual repulsion of the clusters, so that they are forced away from each other. In our experiments we found that in this way we can combine the partitioning property of the probabilistic fuzzy c-means algorithm with the advantages of a possibilistic approach w.r.t. the interpretation of the membership degrees.......