Interpreting multivariate membership degrees of fuzzy clustering methods: A strategy

Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) is the most popular algorithm of the fuzzy clustering approach. Although FCM and its variations have shown good performance in cluster detection, they do not consider that different variables could produce different membership degrees. Motivated by this, the Multi-variate Fuzzy C-Means (MFCM) method was proposed. The MFCM computes membership degrees of both clusters and variables. However, up to now, there is no method that interprets the multivariate membership of the variables for aiding the understanding of clusters. The goal of this paper is, thus, to bridge this gap by proposing a method to do so. In order to illustrate the method proposed, experiments with a synthetic dataset and applications concerning cancer gene expression data are carried out.