Fuzzy variant of affinity propagation in comparison to median fuzzy c-means

Abstract

In this paper we extend the crisp Affinity Propagation (AP) cluster algorithm to a fuzzy variant. AP is a message passing algorithm based on the max-sum-algorithm optimization for factor graphs. Thus it is applicable also for data sets with only dissimilarities known, which may be asymmetric. The proposed Fuzzy Affinity Propagation algorithm (FAP) returns fuzzy assignments to the cluster prototypes based on a probabilistic interpretation of the usual AP. To evaluate the performance of FAP we compare the clustering results of FAP for different experimental and real world problems with solutions obtained by employing Median Fuzzy c-Means (M-FCM) and Fuzzy c-Means (FCM). As measure for cluster agreements we use a fuzzy extension of Cohen's κ based on t-norms. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.