A Fuzzy Clustering Algorithm for Clustering Categorical Data
Dae‐Won Kim, Kwang-H. Lee · Journal of Korean institute of intelligent systems · 2003
In this paper, the conventional k-modes and fuzzy k-modes algorithms for clustering categorical data is extended by representing the clusters of categorical data with fuzzy centroids instead of the hard-type centroids used in the original algorithm. The hard-type centroids of the traditional algorithms had difficulties in dealing with ambiguous boundary data, which might be misclassified and lead to thelocal optima. Use of fuzzy centroids makes it possible to fully exploit the power of fuzzy sets in representing the uncertainty in the classification of categorical data. The distance measure between data and fuzzy centroids is more precise and effective than those of the k-modes and fuzzy k-modes. To test the proposed approach, the proposed algorithm and two conventional algorithms were used to cluster three categorical data sets. The proposed method was found to give markedly better clustering results.