Fuzzy C-Means Clustering —Is it Better than K-Means Clustering?
By: Satyam Kumar
Tags: Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, Education, Clustering, Machine Learning

Fuzzy C-Means Clustering —Is it Better than K-Means Clustering?

Image by Mediamodifier from Pixabay

Clustering is an unsupervised machine learning technique that divides the population into several groups or clusters such that data points in the same group are similar to each other, and data points in different groups are dissimilar.

In other words, clusters are formed in such a way that:

Data points in the same cluster are close to each other and hence they are very similar

Data points in different clusters are far apart and are different from each other.

Clustering is used to identify some segments or groups in your dataset. Clustering can be divided into two subgroups:

(Image by Author), Subgroups of Clustering

(Image by Author), Hard Clustering vs Soft Clustering

Hard Clustering:

In hard clustering, each data point is clustered or grouped to any one cluster. For each data point, it may either completely belong to a cluster or not. As observed in the above diagram, the data points are divided into two clusters, each point belonging to either of the two clusters.

K-Means Clustering is a hard clustering algorithm. It clusters data points into k-clusters. To get a deep dive understanding of the K-Means algorithm, read the below article:

Soft Clustering:

In soft clustering, instead of putting each data points into separate clusters, a probability of that point to be in that cluster assigned. In soft clustering or fuzzy clustering, each data point can belong to multiple clusters along with its probability score or likelihood.

One of the widely used soft clustering algorithms is the Fuzzy C-means clustering (FCM) Algorithm.

Fuzzy C-Means Clustering:

Fuzzy C-Means clustering is a soft clustering approach, where each data point is assigned a likelihood or probability score to belong to that cluster. The step-wise approach of the Fuzzy c-means clustering algorithm is:

Fix the value of c (number of clusters), and select a value of m (generally 1.25<m<2), and initialize partition matrix U.

Calculate cluster centers (centroid).

Here,

µ: Fuzzy membership value

m: fuzziness parameter

Update Partition Matrix

Repeat the above steps until convergence.

Installation and Usage:

To implement the fuzzy c-means algorithm, we have an open-sourced Python package, that can be installed using PyPl:

pip install fuzzy-c-means

Fuzzy c-means is a Python module that can implement the fuzzy c-means algorithm. This module has an API similar to that of Scikit-learn.

Conclusion:

Fuzzy c-means clustering has can be considered a better algorithm compared to the k-Means algorithm. Unlike the k-Means algorithm where the data points exclusively belong to one cluster, in the case of the fuzzy c-means algorithm, the data point can belong to more than one cluster with a likelihood. Fuzzy c-means clustering gives comparatively better results for overlapped data sets.

References:

[1] Fuzzy Clustering Wikipedia (18 Jan 2021): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzy_clustering

[2] Fuzzy c-means Documentation: https://pypi.org/project/fuzzy-c-means/