  Clustering plays an important role in mining big data both as a modeling
technique and a preprocessing step in many data mining process implementations.
Fuzzy clustering provides more flexibility than non-fuzzy methods by allowing
each data record to belong to more than one cluster to some degree. However, a
serious challenge in fuzzy clustering is the lack of scalability. Massive
datasets in emerging fields such as geosciences, biology and networking do
require parallel and distributed computations with high performance to solve
real-world problems. Although some clustering methods are already improved to
execute on big data platforms, but their execution time is highly increased for
large datasets. In this paper, a scalable Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) clustering named
BigFCM is proposed and designed for the Hadoop distributed data platform. Based
on the map-reduce programming model, it exploits several mechanisms including
an efficient caching design to achieve several orders of magnitude reduction in
execution time. Extensive evaluation over multi-gigabyte datasets shows that
BigFCM is scalable while it preserves the quality of clustering.
