A novel fuzzy clustering algorithm is presented in this paper, which removes the constraints generally imposed to the cluster shape when a given model is adopted for membership functions. An on-line, sequential procedure is proposed where the cluster determination is performed by using suited membership functions based on geometrically unconstrained kernels and a point-to-shape distance evaluation. Since the performance of on-line algorithms suffers from the pattern presentation order, we also consider the problem of cluster validity aiming at proving the minimal dependence and the robustness with respect to the initialization of inner parameters in the proposed algorithm. The numerical results reported in the paper prove that the proposed approach is able to improve the performances of well-known algorithms on some reference benchmarks.
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