A constructive particle swarm algorithm for fuzzy clustering

Abstract

This paper proposes a fuzzy version of the crisp cPSC (Constructive Particle Swarm Clustering), called FcPSC (Fuzzy Constructive Particle Swarm Clustering). In addition to detecting fuzzy clusters, the proposed algorithm dynamically determines a suitable number of clusters in the datasets without the need of prior knowledge, necessary in cPSC to control the number of particles in the swarm. The FcPSC algorithm was applied to six databases from the literature and its performance was compared with that of Fuzzy C-Means, a Fuzzy Artificial Immune Network, a Fuzzy Particle Swarm Clustering and the crisp cPSC. FcPSC showed to be competitive with the algorithms used for comparison and the number of particles generated was smaller than for cPSC. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.