Granular Description of Data Structures: A Two-Phase Design

Abstract

The study is concerned with a description of large numeric data with the aid of building a limited collection of representative information granules with the objective of capturing the structure of the original data. The proposed development scheme consists of two steps. First, a clustering algorithm characterized by high flexibility of coping with the diverse geometry of data structure and efficient computational overhead is invoked. At the second step, a clustering algorithm applied to the clusters already formed during the first phase, yielding a collection of numeric prototypes is involved and the numeric prototypes produced there are then generalized into their granular prototypes. The quality of granular prototypes is quantified while their build-up is supported by the mechanisms of granular computing such as the principle of justifiable granularity. In this paper, the clustering algorithms of DBSCAN and fuzzy C -means were used in successive phases of the processed approach. The experimental studies concerning synthetic data and publicly available data are covered and the performance of the developed approach is assessed along with a comparative analysis.