Abstract
Fuzzy clustering becomes a broadly accepted synonym of fundamental endeavors aimed at finding structures in multidimensional data. In essence, these methods operate in unsupervised mode. This means that they act upon data while being directed by some predefined objective function (criterion) for which they “discover” a structure (clusters) that yields a minimal value of this criterion. In this study, we discuss an issue of exploiting and effectively incorporating auxiliary problem dependent hints being available as a part of the domain knowledge associated with the pattern recognition problem at hand. As such hints are usually expressed by experts/data analysts at the level of clusters (information granules) rather than individual data (patterns), we refer to them as knowledge-based indicators and allude to a set of them as a knowledge-based guidance available to fuzzy clustering. The proposed paradigm shift in which fuzzy clustering incorporates this type of knowledge-based supervision is discussed and contrasted with the “pure” (that is data-driven) version of fuzzy clustering. Several fundamental categories of the guidance mechanisms are introduced and discussed, namely partial supervision, proximity-based guidance and uncertainty driven knowledge hints. The details on how the guidance machinery translates into updates of the partition matrices are presented. We also present a number of practical scenarios in which the role of knowledge hints becomes evident and highly justifiable. This concerns Web exploration, exploitation of labeled patterns, issues of incomplete feature spaces, and constraints of typicality of patterns, to name a few representative applications.