Fuzzy clustering: A historical perspective

Abstract

Fuzzy sets emerged in 1965 in a paper by Lotfi Zadeh. In 1969 Ruspini published a seminal paper that has become the basis of most fuzzy clustering algorithms. His ideas established the underlying structure for fuzzy partitioning, and also described and exemplified the first algorithm for accomplishing it. Bezdek developed the general case of the fuzzy c-means model in 1973. Many branches of this tree grew from 1969 to 1993. Then another watershed paper in fuzzy clustering appeared: Krishnapuram and Keller?s work on possibilistic clustering. This tree has also developed many branches, and together, these two topics comprise two thirds (of the conceptual field) of soft clustering (the other th..