A novel intuitionistic fuzzy clustering method for geo-demographic analysis

Geo-Demographic Analysis (GDA) is an important tool to explore the underlying rules that regulate our world, and therefore, it has been widely applied to the development of effective socio-economic policies through the analysis of data generated from Geographic Information Systems (GIS). In GDA applications, clustering plays a major role however, the current state-of-the-art algorithms, namely the Fuzzy Geographically Weighted Clustering (FGWC), have demonstrated several limitations both in terms of speed and in terms of quality of the achieved results. Accordingly, in this paper, we propose a novel clustering algorithm for GDA application, based on recent results regarding intuitionistic fuzzy sets and the possibilistic fuzzy C-means, that aims at overcoming some of the limitations of the existing methods. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.