FW-S3PFCM: Feature-Weighted Safe-Semi Possibilistic Fuzzy C-Means Clustering

Abstract

The safe semi-supervised fuzzy c-means clustering (S3FCM) method is a well-known clustering method that can produce successful results by incorporating prior knowledge of the class distribution. Its process is fast and simple but still has two limitations. The first issue is that it gives equal weight to all data features, while in real-world applications, different features usually have different importance. Secondly, S3FCM is very sensitive to noise and outliers. This paper proposes an extension of the S3FCM, entitled FW-S3PFCM, to mitigate these shortcomings. The proposed method uses a local feature weighting scheme to consider the different feature weights in the clustering process. Additionally, a possibilistic version of the S3FCM is designed to reduce the sensitivity to noise and outliers. The effectiveness of the proposed method is comprehensively evaluated on various benchmark datasets, and its performance is compared with the state-of-the-arts methods. To practically asses the FW-S3FCM, a real-world dataset of brain MRI images and its segmentation performance are analyzed as well. The average Accuracy, F1-score, Sensitivity, and Precision measures obtained by FW-S3FCM are 0.9682, 0.9826, 0.9743, and 0.9925, respectively, which are better than the competitors' performance.