Semi-Supervised Fuzzy Clustering Based on Prior Membership

Traditional fuzzy clustering algorithms construct sample partition criteria solely based on similarity measures but lack an effective representation of prior membership information, which limits further improvements in clustering accuracy. To address this issue, this paper proposes a semi-supervised fuzzy clustering algorithm based on prior membership (SFCM-PM). The proposed algorithm introduces prior information entropy as a metric to quantify the divergence between partition membership and prior membership and incorporates this as an auxiliary partition criterion into the objective function. By jointly optimizing data similarity and consistency with prior knowledge during the clustering process, the algorithm achieves more accurate and reliable clustering results. The experimental results demonstrate that the SFCM-PM algorithm achieves significant performance improvements by incorporating a small number of prior membership samples across several standard and real-world datasets. It also performs outstandingly on datasets with unbalanced sample distributions.