Possibilistic Clustering Methods for Interval-Valued Data

Outliers may have many anomalous causes, for example, credit card fraud, cyber-intrusion or breakdown of a system. Several research areas and application domains have investigated this problem. The popular fuzzy c-means algorithm is sensitive to noise and outlying data. In contrast, the possibilistic partitioning methods are used to solve these problems and other ones. The goal of this paper is to introduce cluster algorithms for partitioning a set of symbolic interval-type data using the possibilistic approach. In addition, a new way of measuring the membership value, according to each feature, is proposed. Experiments with artificial and real symbolic interval-type data sets are used to evaluate the methods. The results of the proposed methods are better than the traditional soft clustering ones.