A Fuzzy Approach for Multitype Relational Data Clustering

Mining interrelated data among multiple types of objects or entities is important in many real-world applications. Despite extensive study on fuzzy clustering of vector space data, very limited exploration has been made on fuzzy clustering of relational data that involve several object types. In this paper, we propose a new fuzzy clustering approach for multitype relational data (FC-MR). In FC-MR, different types of objects are clustered simultaneously. An object is assigned a large membership with respect to a cluster if its related objects in this cluster have high rankings. In each cluster, an object tends to have a high ranking if its related objects have large memberships in this cluster. The FC-MR approach is formulated to deal with multitype relational data with various structures. The objective function of FC-MR is locally optimized by an efficient iterative algorithm, which updates the fuzzy membership matrix and the ranking matrix of one type at once while keeping those of other types constant. We also discuss the simplified FC-MR for multitype relational data with two special structures, namely, star-structure and extended star-structure. Experimental studies are conducted on benchmark document datasets to illustrate how the proposed approach can be applied flexibly under different scenarios in real-world applications. The experimental results demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the new approach compared with existing ones.