Suppressed possibilistic fuzzy c-means clustering based on shadow sets for noisy data with imbalanced sizes

Possibilistic fuzzy c-means clustering (PFCM) algorithm generates fewer overlapping clustering centers than the possibilistic c-means clustering (PCM) algorithm and possesses better noise immunity than fuzzy c-means clustering (FCM) algorithm. However, with the increasing noise intensity and number of clusters, PFCM still faces the problem of getting partially overlapping clustering centers or mislocated centers in noise regions. Moreover, the sample-size imbalance increasingly intensifies the difficulty of positioning centers of small clusters. To solve the above problems, a suppressed possibilistic fuzzy c-means clustering algorithm based on shadow sets (S-SPFCM) is proposed by introducing the shadow set theory and the "suppressed competitive learning" strategy. Firstly, KL divergence is introduced in the objective function of PFCM to increase the anti-noise robustness of fuzzy memberships against long-range noise and outliers. Secondly, to reduce the number of overlapping centers caused by possibilistic memberships, the shadow set theory is introduced to divide each class adaptively into three regions (core, shadow, and exclusion regions) by an uncertainty balance method. The suppressed competitive learning method is extended by modifying the memberships of points within the three regions, thus artificially guiding the iterative track of clustering centers. Meanwhile, to further reduce the influence of imbalanced sizes, a scheme to reset mislocated centers in the core and shadow regions is also designed. In addition, to improve the segmentation performance of S-SPFCM for noisy images, a suppressed possibilistic fuzzy c-means clustering algorithm based on shadow sets and local information (SL-SPFCM) is also proposed. The SLSPFCM first improves the Euclidean distance by a distance filtering scheme. Then SL-SPFCM introduces the local median membership of each pixel into the KL divergence of the objective function. Finally, experiments on synthetic datasets and color images which are characteristic of imbalanced sizes and noise injection demonstrate the proposed S-SPFCM and SL-SPFCM algorithms achieve smaller center deviations and higher clustering accuracy compared with several state-of-the-art clustering algorithms.