Abstract
Incomplete data clustering is often encountered in practice. Here the treatment of missing attribute value and the optimization procedure of clustering are the important factors impacting the clustering performance. In this study, a missing attribute value becomes an information granule and is represented as a certain interval. To avoid intervals determined by different cluster information, we propose a congeneric nearest-neighbor rule-based architecture of the preclassification result, which can improve the effectiveness of estimation of missing attribute interval. Furthermore, a global fuzzy clustering approach using particle swarm optimization assisted by the Fuzzy C-Means is proposed. A novel encoding scheme where particles are composed of the cluster prototypes and the missing attribute values is considered in the optimization procedure. The proposed approach improves the accuracy of clustering results, moreover, the missing attribute imputation can be implemented at the same time. The experimental results of several UCI data sets show the efficiency of the proposed approach. (C) 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.