  Clustering is an important facet of explorative data mining and finds
extensive use in several fields. In this paper, we propose an extension of the
classical Fuzzy C-Means clustering algorithm. The proposed algorithm,
abbreviated as VFC, adopts a multi-dimensional membership vector for each data
point instead of the traditional, scalar membership value defined in the
original algorithm. The membership vector for each point is obtained by
considering each feature of that point separately and obtaining individual
membership values for the same. We also propose an algorithm to efficiently
allocate the initial cluster centers close to the actual centers, so as to
facilitate rapid convergence. Further, we propose a scheme to achieve crisp
clustering using the VFC algorithm. The proposed, novel clustering scheme has
been tested on two standard data sets in order to analyze its performance. We
also examine the efficacy of the proposed scheme by analyzing its performance
on image segmentation examples and comparing it with the classical Fuzzy
C-means clustering algorithm.
