Fuzzy Clustering by Hyperbolic Smoothing

We propose a novel method for building fuzzy clusters of large data sets, using a smoothing numerical approach. The usual sum-of-squares criterion is relaxed so the search for good fuzzy partitions is made on a continuous space, rather than a combinatorial space as in classical methods citeHartigan. The smoothing allows a conversion from a strongly non-differentiable problem into differentiable subproblems of optimization without constraints of low dimension, by using a differentiable function of infinite class. For the implementation of the algorithm we used the statistical software R and the results obtained were compared to the traditional fuzzy C--means method, proposed by Bezdek.