Fig. 11

Clustering outcomes of discrete k-means clustering (top row) and fuzzy c-means clustering (bottom row). The top-left panel shows the ground truth, a sample (N = 600) from a simulated population made up of three equally sized and equidistant subgroups. The middle column shows the assignment of observations to clusters, and the right column shows the corresponding silhouette coefficients. The shading in the bottom silhouette plot indicates the discrete clustering silhouette coefficients, and the coloured bars indicate a transformation equivalent to that performed to compute the fuzzy silhouette score. The bottom-left shows a bunny (also fuzzy) amid contained and well-separated ellipsoidal clusters (photo by Tim Reckmann, licensed CC-BY 2.0)