A Generalization of Possibilistic Fuzzy C-Means Method for Statistical Clustering of Data

The Fuzzy C-means (FCM) algorithm has been widely used in the field of clustering and classification but has encountered difficulties with noisy data and outliers. Other versions of algorithms related to possibilistic theory have given good results, such as Fuzzy C- Means(FCM), possibilistic C-means (PCM), Fuzzy possibilistic C-means (FPCM) and possibilistic fuzzy C- Means algorithm (PFCM).This last algorithm works effectively in some environments but encountered more shortcomings with noisy databases. To solve this problem, we propose in this manuscript, a new algorithm named Improved Possibilistic Fuzzy C-Means (ImPFCM) by combining the PFCM algorithm with a very powerful statistical method. The properties of this new ImPFCM algorithm show that it is not only applicable on clusters of spherical shapes, but also on clusters of different sizes and densities. The results of the comparative study with very recent algorithms indicate the performance and the superiority of the proposed approach to easily group the datasets in a large-dimensional space and to use not only the Euclidean distance but more sophisticated standards norms, capable to deal with much more complicated problems. On the other hand, we have demonstrated that the ImPFCM algorithm is also capable of detecting the cluster center with high accuracy and performing satisfactorily in multiple environments with noisy data and outliers.

Prediction and error in early infant speech learning: a speech acquisition model

In the last two decades, statistical clustering models have emerged as a dominant model of how infants learn the sounds of their language. However, recent empirical and computational evidence suggests that purely statistical clustering methods may not be sufficient to explain speech sound acquisition. To model early development of speech perception, the present study used a two-layer network trained with Rescorla-Wagner learning equations, an implementation of discriminative, error-driven learning. The model contained no a priori linguistic units, such as phonemes or phonetic features. Instead, expectations about the upcoming acoustic speech signal were learned from the surrounding speech signal, with spectral components extracted from an audio recording of child-directed speech as both inputs and outputs of the model. To evaluate model performance, we simulated infant responses in the high-amplitude sucking paradigm using vowel and fricative pairs and continua. The simulations were able to discriminate vowel and consonant pairs and predicted the infant speech perception data. The model also showed the greatest amount of discrimination in the expected spectral frequencies. These results suggest that discriminative error-driven learning may provide a viable approach to mod- elling early infant speech sound acquisition.

Background Modeling Based on Statistical Clustering Partitioning

In order to effectively detect dim-small targets in complex scenes, background suppression is applied to highlight the targets. This paper presents a statistical clustering partitioning low-rank background modeling algorithm (SCPLBMA), which clusters the image into several patches based on image statistics. The image matrix of each patch is decomposed into low-rank matrix and sparse matrix in the SCPLBMA. The background of the original video frames is reconstructed from the low-rank matrices, and the targets can be obtained by subtracting the background. Experiments on different scenes show that the SCPLBMA can effectively suppress the background and textures and equalize the residual noise with gray levels significantly lower than that of the targets. Thus, the difference images obtain good stationary characteristics, and the contrast between the targets and the residual backgrounds is significantly improved. Compared with six other algorithms, the SCPLBMA significantly improved the target detection rates of single-frame threshold segmentation.