Improved Fuzzy Art Method for Initializing K-means

Abstract

The K-means algorithm is quite sensitive to the cluster centers selected initially and can perform different clusterings depending on these initialization conditions. Within the scope of this study, a new method based on the Fuzzy ART algorithm which is called Improved Fuzzy ART (IFART) is used in the determination of initial cluster centers. By using IFART, better quality clusters are achieved than Fuzzy ART do and also IFART is as good as Fuzzy ART about capable of fast clustering and capability on large scaled data clustering. Consequently, it is observed that, with the proposed method, the clustering operation is completed in fewer steps, that it is performed in a more stable manner by fixing the initialization points and that it is completed with a smaller error margin compared with the conventional K-means.