Incremental kernel fuzzy c-means with optimizing cluster center initialization and delivery

Purpose The large volume of big data makes it impractical for traditional clustering algorithms which are usually designed for entire data set. The purpose of this paper is to focus on incremental clustering which divides data into series of data chunks and only a small amount of data need to be clustered at each time. Few researches on incremental clustering algorithm address the problem of optimizing cluster center initialization for each data chunk and selecting multiple passing points for each cluster. Design/methodology/approach Through optimizing initial cluster centers, quality of clustering results is improved for each data chunk and then quality of final clustering results is enhanced. Moreover, through selecting multiple passing points, more accurate information is passed down to improve the final clustering results. The method has been proposed to solve those two problems and is applied in the proposed algorithm based on streaming kernel fuzzy c-means (stKFCM) algorithm. Findings Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm demonstrates more accuracy and better performance than streaming kernel stKFCM algorithm. Originality/value This paper addresses the problem of improving the performance of increment clustering through optimizing cluster center initialization and selecting multiple passing points. The paper analyzed the performance of the proposed scheme and proved its effectiveness.