title: An Extended Membrane System with Active Membranes to Solve Automatic Fuzzy Clustering Problems.
abstract: This paper focuses on automatic fuzzy clustering problem and proposes a novel automatic fuzzy clustering method that employs an extended membrane system with active membranes that has been designed as its computing framework. The extended membrane system has a dynamic membrane structure; since membranes can evolve, it is particularly suitable for processing the automatic fuzzy clustering problem. A modification of a differential evolution (DE) mechanism was developed as evolution rules for objects according to membrane structure and object communication mechanisms. Under the control of both the object's evolution-communication mechanism and the membrane evolution mechanism, the extended membrane system can effectively determine the most appropriate number of clusters as well as the corresponding optimal cluster centers. The proposed method was evaluated over 13 benchmark problems and was compared with four state-of-the-art automatic clustering methods, two recently developed clustering methods and six classification techniques. The comparison results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method in terms of effectiveness and robustness.
authors.affiliation: 1 Center for Radio Administration and Technology Development, School of Computer and Software Engineering, Xihua University, Chengdu 610039, P. R. China.
authors.forename: Hong
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Peng
authors.affiliation: 2 School of Electrical and Electronic Information Engineering, Xihua University, Chengdu 610039, P. R. China.
authors.forename: Jun
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: 3 College of Automation, Harbin Engineering University, Harbin 150001, P. R. China.|4 College of Engineering and Science, Victoria University, Melbourne VIC 8001, Australia.|5 School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA 5005, Australia.
authors.forename: Peng
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Shi
authors.affiliation: 6 Research Group of Natural Computing, Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, University of Seville, Sevilla 41012, Spain.
authors.forename: Mario J
authors.initials: MJ
authors.lastname: Pérez-Jiménez
authors.affiliation: 6 Research Group of Natural Computing, Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, University of Seville, Sevilla 41012, Spain.
authors.forename: Agustín
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Riscos-Núñez
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D016000:Cluster Analysis; D016208:Databases, Factual; D017143:Fuzzy Logic; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D016571:Neural Networks, Computer
keywords: Data clustering; automatic fuzzy clustering problem; membrane computing; membrane systems with active membranes