The Comparison of Fuzzy Clustering Methods for Symbolic Interval-Valued Data

Abstract

Interval-valued data can find their practical applications in such situations as recording monthly interval temperatures at meteorological stations, daily interval stock prices, etc. The primary objective of the presented paper is to compare three different methods of fuzzy clustering for interval-valued symbolic data, i.e.: fuzzy c-means clustering, adaptive fuzzy c-means clustering and fuzzy k-means clustering with fuzzy spectral clustering. Fuzzy spectral clustering combines both spectral and fuzzy approaches in order to obtain better results (in terms of Rand index for fuzzy clustering). The conducted simulation studies with artificial and real data sets confirm both higher usefulness and more stable results of fuzzy spectral clustering method, as compared to other existing fuzzy clustering methods for symbolic interval-valued data, when dealing with data featuring different cluster structures, noisy variables and/or outliers.