Nonhierarchical fuzzy clustering

Commonly in nonhierarchical cluster analysis, one starts with an initial partitioning of objects to the different clusters. After that, the membership of the objects to the clusters, for example, to the cluster centroids, is determined and the objects are newly partitioned. We consider here a general method for nonhierarchical clustering that can be used for both crisp (classical) and fuzzy clustering, the c-means algorithm. 

Examples of nonhierarchical clustering [22] methods include Gaussian mixture models, means, and fuzzy C means. They can be subdivided into hard and soft clustering methods. Hard classification methods such as means assign pixels to membership of only one cluster whereas soft classifications such as fuzzy C means assign degrees of fractional membership in each cluster. 

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