Hybrid Fuzzy Clustering Method Based on FCM and Enhanced Logarithmical PSO (ELPSO)

Fuzzy c-means (FCM) is one of the best-known clustering methods to organize the wide variety of datasets automatically and acquire accurate classification, but it has a tendency to fall into local minima. For overcoming these weaknesses, some methods that hybridize PSO and FCM for clustering have been proposed in the literature, and it is demonstrated that these hybrid methods have an improved accuracy over traditional partition clustering approaches, whereas PSO-based clustering methods have poor execution time in comparison to partitional clustering techniques, and the current PSO algorithms require tuning a range of parameters before they are able to find good solutions. Therefore, this paper introduces a hybrid method for fuzzy clustering, named FCM-ELPSO, which aim to deal with these shortcomings. It combines FCM with an improved version of PSO, called ELPSO, which adopts a new enhanced logarithmic inertia weight strategy to provide better balance between exploration and exploitation. This new hybrid method uses PBM(F) index and the objective function value as cluster validity indexes to evaluate the clustering effect. To verify the effectiveness of the algorithm, two types of experiments are performed, including PSO clustering and hybrid clustering. Experiments show that the proposed approach significantly improves convergence speed and the clustering effect.