Multi-view clustering has been received considerable attention due to the widespread collection of multi-view data from diverse domains and sources. However, storing multi-view data across multiple devices in many real scenarios poses significant challenges for efficient data analysis. Federated Learning framework enables collaborative machine learning on distributed devices while preserving privacy constraints. Even though there have been intensive algorithms on multi-view fuzzy clustering, federated multi-view fuzzy clustering has not been adequately investigated so far. In this study, we first develop the federated learning mode into multi-view fuzzy clustering and realize the federated optimization procedure, called Federated Multiview Fuzzy C-Means clustering (FedMVFCM). Then, we design an original strategy of consensus prototype learning during federated multi-view fuzzy clustering. It is termed as Federated Multi-view Fuzzy c-means consensus Prototypes Clustering (FedMVFPC). We also further develop the federated alternative optimization algorithm with proven convergence. This study also introduces the notion of clustering prototype communication within the federated learning framework, and integrates the clustering prototypes of different views into a unified optimization formulation. The experimental studies on various benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed FedMVFPC method improves the federated clustering performance and efficiency. It achieves comparable or better clustering performance against the existing state-of-the-art multi-view clustering algorithms

In this paper, we develop a comprehensive conceptual and algorithmic framework to cope with a problem of clustering homogeneous information granules. While there have been several approaches to coping with granular (viz. nonnumeric) data, the origin of granular data themselves considered there is somewhat unclear and, as a consequence, the results of clustering start lacking some full-fledged interpretation. In this paper, we offer a holistic view at clustering information granules and an evaluation of the results of clustering. We start with a process of forming information granules with the use of the principle of justifiable granularity (PJG). With this regard, we discuss a number of parameters used in this development of information granules as well as quantify the quality of the granules produced in this manner. In the sequel, Fuzzy C-Means is applied to cluster the derived information granules, which are represented in a parametric manner and associated with weights resulting from the usage of the PJG. The quality of clustering results is evaluated through the use of the reconstruction criterion (quantifying the concept of information granulation and degranulation). A suite of experiments using synthetic and publicly available datasets is reported to quantify the performance of the proposed approach and highlight its key features.

Incomplete data are frequently encountered and bring difficulties when it comes to further processing. The concepts of granular computing (GrC) help deliver a higher level of abstraction to address this problem. Most of the existing data imputation and related modeling methods are of numeric nature and require prior numeric models to be provided. The underlying objective of this study is to introduce a novel and straightforward approach that uses information granules as a vehicle to effectively represent missing data and build granular fuzzy models directly from resulting hybrid granular and numeric data. The evaluation and optimization of this method are guided by the principle of justifiable granularity engaging the coverage and specificity criteria and carried out with the help of particle swarm optimization. We provide a collection of experimental studies using a synthetic dataset and several publicly available real-world datasets to demonstrate the feasibility and analyze the main features of this method.

The ageing coefficient is selected as the index to evaluate population ageing, and some methods are proposed for analyzing differences in regional population ageing from temporal and spatial perspectives. China is used as the case study over the period 1998–2014. The concentration degree of the elderly varies regionally, but fluctuations in regional population ageing remain relatively stable. The coefficient of variation of population ageing fluctuates with an overall decreasing tendency. Population ageing in China exhibits a ladder-like distribution different from the distribution corresponding to economic strength. Spatial autocorrelation in population ageing is observed, with a comparatively steady spatial pattern.

Multi-view learning becomes increasingly attractive and promising because multimodal or multi-view data are commonly encountered in real-world applications. In this study, we develop a novel multi-view Takagi-Sugeno-Kang (TSK) fuzzy system framework to handle classification problems for such data. We propose an anchor and graph subspace clustering strategy to discover and represent the actual latent data distribution for each view separately. In this way, the discriminate anchors (landmarks) are learned to capture the main structure of the multi-view data. This strategy also provides a computationally efficient clustering algorithm with respect to the number of instances. These resulting anchors are formed as the prototypes of information granules (IGs) for fuzzy modeling. Then we construct an information-granule-based multi-view TSK fuzzy classification model inherited from the natural interpretability of fuzzy rule-based systems. Concretely, the relationship between the multi-view input and label output spaces is depicted by IGs-oriented fuzzy rules. The experimental studies involve various commonly used benchmark datasets, which indicate that our proposed method achieves comparable or better performance compared to the state-of-the-art algorithms.