Online Feature Selection Based on Fuzzy Clustering and Its Applications
Thanh Minh Nguyen, Q. M. Jonathan Wu · IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems · 2015
Fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering has been successfully applied in various pattern recognition areas. While FCM is gaining attention, an important issue arising from these studies is the need to determine which attributes of the data should be used. Answering this question is difficult, because there is no labeled training data available in clustering to guide the search. We present a feature selection for FCM. The advantage of our method is that it is intuitively appealing, avoiding combinatorial searches, and allowing us to prune the feature set. Our method is also adaptable and can change through complex scenes in an online environment. We do not have to wait until all data have been generated before learning begins. Finally, to estimate the model parameters, the gradient method is adopted to minimize the fuzzy objective function with the Kullback-Leibler divergence information. Numerical experiments are presented to demonstrate the robustness and accuracy of our method.