Fast Fuzzy Clustering Based on Anchor Graph

Fuzzy clustering is one of the most popular clustering approaches and has attracted considerable attention in many fields. However, high computational cost has become a bottleneck which limits its applications in large-scale problems. Moreover, most fuzzy clustering algorithms are sensitive to noise. To address these issues, a novel fuzzy clustering algorithm, called fast fuzzy clustering based on anchor graph (FFCAG), is proposed. The FFCAG algorithm integrates anchor-based similarity graph construction and membership matrix learning into a unified framework, such that the prior knowledge of anchors can be further utilized to improve clustering performance. Specifically, FFCAG first constructs an anchor-based similarity graph with a parameter-free neighbor assignment strategy. Then, it designs a quadratic programming model to learn the membership matrix of anchors, which is very different from traditional fuzzy clustering algorithms. More importantly, a novel balanced regularization term is introduced into the objective function to produce more accurate clustering results. Finally, we adopt an alternating optimization algorithm with guaranteed convergence to solve the proposed method. Experimental results performed on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the proposed FFCAG can significantly reduce the computational time with comparable, even superior, clustering performance, compared with state-of-the-art algorithms.