scholarly journals A study of longitudinal mobile health data through fuzzy clustering methods for functional data: The case of allergic rhinoconjunctivitis in childhood

PLoS ONE ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (11) ◽  
pp. e0242197
Author(s):  
Paolo Giordani ◽  
Serena Perna ◽  
Annamaria Bianchi ◽  
Antonio Pizzulli ◽  
Salvatore Tripodi ◽  
...  

The use of mobile communication devices in health care is spreading worldwide. A huge amount of health data collected by these devices (mobile health data) is nowadays available. Mobile health data may allow for real-time monitoring of patients and delivering ad-hoc treatment recommendations. This paper aims at showing how this may be done by exploiting the potentialities of fuzzy clustering techniques. In fact, such techniques can be fruitfully applied to mobile health data in order to identify clusters of patients for diagnostic classification and cluster-specific therapies. However, since mobile health data are full of noise, fuzzy clustering methods cannot be directly applied to mobile health data. Such data must be denoised prior to analyzing them. When longitudinal mobile health data are available, functional data analysis represents a powerful tool for filtering out the noise in the data. Fuzzy clustering methods for functional data can then be used to determine groups of patients. In this work we develop a fuzzy clustering method, based on the concept of medoid, for functional data and we apply it to longitudinal mHealth data on daily symptoms and consumptions of anti-symptomatic drugs collected by two sets of patients in Berlin (Germany) and Ascoli Piceno (Italy) suffering from allergic rhinoconjunctivitis. The studies showed that clusters of patients with similar changes in symptoms were identified opening the possibility of precision medicine.

Author(s):  
Yuchi Kanzawa ◽  

In this paper, a power-regularization-based fuzzy clustering method is proposed for spherical data. Power regularization has not been previously applied to fuzzy clustering for spherical data. The proposed method is transformed to the conventional fuzzy clustering method, entropy-regularized fuzzy clustering for spherical data (eFCS), for a specified fuzzification parameter value. Numerical experiments on two artificial datasets reveal the properties of the proposed method. Furthermore, numerical experiments on four real datasets indicate that this method is more accurate than the conventional fuzzy clustering methods: standard fuzzy clustering for spherical data (sFCS) and eFCS.


Mathematics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (12) ◽  
pp. 1423
Author(s):  
Javier Bonilla ◽  
Daniel Vélez ◽  
Javier Montero ◽  
J. Tinguaro Rodríguez

In the last two decades, information entropy measures have been relevantly applied in fuzzy clustering problems in order to regularize solutions by avoiding the formation of partitions with excessively overlapping clusters. Following this idea, relative entropy or divergence measures have been similarly applied, particularly to enable that kind of entropy-based regularization to also take into account, as well as interact with, cluster size variables. Particularly, since Rényi divergence generalizes several other divergence measures, its application in fuzzy clustering seems promising for devising more general and potentially more effective methods. However, previous works making use of either Rényi entropy or divergence in fuzzy clustering, respectively, have not considered cluster sizes (thus applying regularization in terms of entropy, not divergence) or employed divergence without a regularization purpose. Then, the main contribution of this work is the introduction of a new regularization term based on Rényi relative entropy between membership degrees and observation ratios per cluster to penalize overlapping solutions in fuzzy clustering analysis. Specifically, such Rényi divergence-based term is added to the variance-based Fuzzy C-means objective function when allowing cluster sizes. This then leads to the development of two new fuzzy clustering methods exhibiting Rényi divergence-based regularization, the second one extending the first by considering a Gaussian kernel metric instead of the Euclidean distance. Iterative expressions for these methods are derived through the explicit application of Lagrange multipliers. An interesting feature of these expressions is that the proposed methods seem to take advantage of a greater amount of information in the updating steps for membership degrees and observations ratios per cluster. Finally, an extensive computational study is presented showing the feasibility and comparatively good performance of the proposed methods.


Author(s):  
Yanwei Zhao ◽  
Huijun Tang ◽  
Nan Su ◽  
Wanliang Wang

Design for product adaptability is one of the techniques used to provide customers with products that exactly meet their requirements. Clustering methods have been used extensively in the study of product adaptability design. Of the clustering methods, the fuzzy clustering method is the most widely in the design field. The three main kinds of fuzzy clustering methods are the transitive closure method, the dynamic direct method and the maximum tree method. The dynamic direct clustering method has been found to produce design solutions with the lowest cost. In this paper, a new approach for obtaining adaptable product designs using the clustering method is proposed. The method consists of three steps. Firstly, the extension distance formula is used to determine the distance between two products in a product database. The product design space and the distances between individuals are used as grouping criteria in this step. Secondly, the minimal distance between products is used to obtain the clustering index. Thirdly, the threshold value is used to divide the products in the database into groups. Customer demands and the results obtained from the adaptable function (based on the extension distance formula) are used to evaluate the fitness of the groups and their corresponding products. The product with the largest adaptable function value to demand ratio is selected product. In order to the show the advantage of using the extension-clustering method, both the extension-clustering method and the dynamic direct method are presented and compared. The comparison indicates that the extension-clustering method leads to quicker evaluations of design alternatives and results that more closely match customers’ demands. An example of the adaptable design of circular saws tools is used to demonstrate that with the extension-clustering design method a high variety of intelligent configurations can be obtained with significant rapidity.


Algorithms ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (7) ◽  
pp. 158
Author(s):  
Tran Dinh Khang ◽  
Nguyen Duc Vuong ◽  
Manh-Kien Tran ◽  
Michael Fowler

Clustering is an unsupervised machine learning technique with many practical applications that has gathered extensive research interest. Aside from deterministic or probabilistic techniques, fuzzy C-means clustering (FCM) is also a common clustering technique. Since the advent of the FCM method, many improvements have been made to increase clustering efficiency. These improvements focus on adjusting the membership representation of elements in the clusters, or on fuzzifying and defuzzifying techniques, as well as the distance function between elements. This study proposes a novel fuzzy clustering algorithm using multiple different fuzzification coefficients depending on the characteristics of each data sample. The proposed fuzzy clustering method has similar calculation steps to FCM with some modifications. The formulas are derived to ensure convergence. The main contribution of this approach is the utilization of multiple fuzzification coefficients as opposed to only one coefficient in the original FCM algorithm. The new algorithm is then evaluated with experiments on several common datasets and the results show that the proposed algorithm is more efficient compared to the original FCM as well as other clustering methods.


Author(s):  
Tadafumi Kondo ◽  
◽  
Yuchi Kanzawa

This paper presents two fuzzy clustering algorithms for categorical multivariate data based on q-divergence. First, this study shows that a conventional method for vectorial data can be explained as regularizing another conventional method using q-divergence. Second, based on the known results that Kullback-Leibler (KL)-divergence is generalized into the q-divergence, and two conventional fuzzy clustering methods for categorical multivariate data adopt KL-divergence, two fuzzy clustering algorithms for categorical multivariate data that are based on q-divergence are derived from two optimization problems built by extending the KL-divergence in these conventional methods to the q-divergence. Through numerical experiments using real datasets, the proposed methods outperform the conventional methods in term of clustering accuracy.


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