On various types of controlled-sized clustering based on optimization

Clustering is one of unsupervised classification method, that is, it classifies a data set into some clusters without any external criterion. Typical clustering methods, e.g. k-means (KM) or fuzzy c-means (FCM) are constructed based on optimization of the given objective function. Many clustering methods as well as KM and FCM are formulated as optimization problems with typical objective functions and constraints. The objective function itself is also an evaluation guideline of results of clustering methods. Considered together with its theoretical extensibility, there is the great advantage to construct clustering methods in the framework of optimization. From the viewpoint of optimization, some of the authors proposed an Even-sized Clustering method Based on Optimization (ECBO), which is with tight constraints of cluster size, and constructed some variations of ECBO. The constraint considered in ECBO is that each cluster size is K or K + 1, and the belongingness of each object to clusters is calculated by the simplex method in each iteration. It is considered that ECBO has the advantage in the viewpoint of clustering accuracy, cluster size, and optimization framework than other similar methods. However, the constraint of cluster sizes of ECBO is tight in the meaning of cluster size so that it may be inconvenient in case that some extra margin of cluster size is allowed. Moreover, it is expected that new clustering algorithms in which each cluster size can be controlled deal with more various datasets. From the above view point, we proposed two new clustering algorithms based on ECBO. One is COntrolled-sized Clustering Based on Optimization (COCBO), and the other is an extended COCBO, which is referred to as COntrolled-sized Clustering Based on Optimization++ (COCBO++). Each cluster size can be controlled in the algorithms. However, these algorithms have some problems. In this paper, we will describe various types of COCBO to solve the above problems and estimate the methods in some numerical examples.