A New Belief-based Incomplete Pattern Unsupervised Classification Method

Abstract

The clustering of incomplete patterns is a very challenging task because the estimations may negatively affect the distribution of real centers and thus cause uncertainty and imprecision in the results. To address this problem, a new belief-based incomplete pattern unsupervised classification method (BPC) is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the complete patterns are grouped into a few clusters by a classical soft method like fuzzy c-means to obtain the corresponding reliable centers and thereby are partitioned into reliable patterns and unreliable ones by an optimization method. Secondly, a basic classifier trained by reliable patterns is employed to classifies unreliable patterns and the incomplete patterns edited by the neighbors. In this way, most of the edited incomplete patterns can be submitted to specific clusters. Finally, some ambiguous patterns will be carefully repartitioned again by a new distance-based rule depending on the obtained reliable centers and belief functions theory. By doing this, a few patterns that are very difficult to classify between different specific clusters will be reasonably submitted to meta-cluster which can characterize the uncertainty and imprecision of the clusters due to missing values. The simulation results show that the BPC has the potential to deal with real datasets.