BPEC: Belief-Peaks Evidential Clustering

This paper introduces a new evidential clustering method based on the notion of “belief peaks” in the framework of belief functions. The basic idea is that all data objects in the neighborhood of each sample provide pieces of evidence that induce belief on the possibility of such sample to become a cluster center. A sample having higher belief than its neighbors and located far away from the other local maxima is then characterized as cluster center. Finally, a credal partition is created by minimizing an objective function with the fixed cluster centers. An adaptive distance metric is used to fit for unknown shapes of data structures. We show that the proposed evidential clustering procedure has very good performance with an ability to reveal the data structure in the form of a credal partition, from which hard, fuzzy, possibilistic, and rough partitions can be derived. Simulations on synthetic and real-world datasets validate our conclusions.