Fuzzy clustering with supervision

This study is concerned with clustering carried out in presence of labeled patterns. An objective of this optimization is to reconcile between the structure residing in data (and being primarily discovered by the underlying clustering mechanism) and the labels of the patterns forming such structure. In this sense, one can consider the supervised fuzzy clustering to be a framework of preliminary data analysis providing with a thorough insight into the structure of the data and supporting the ensuing design of detailed classifiers. The proposed method augments the standard fuzzy C-means algorithm by extending the original objective function by the supervision component (labeled patterns). Experimental results illustrate the approach and discuss the use of this type of clustering in vector quantization. (C) 2003 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.