Clustering is one of the well-known unsupervised learning methods, in which a data set is grouped into some number of homogeneous clusters. There are numerous clustering algorithms available and they have been used in various applications. Fuzzy c-means (FCM), the most well-known partitional clustering algorithm, was established in 1970's and still in use. However, there are some unsolved problems in FCM and variants of FCM are still under development. In this paper, the problems in FCM are first explained and the available solutions are investigated, which is aimed to give researchers some possible ways of future research. Most of the FCM variants try to solve the problems using domain knowledge specific to a given problem. However, in this paper, we try to give general solutions without using any domain knowledge. Although there are more things left than discovered, this paper may be a good starting point for researchers newly entered into a clustering area.

Principal component analysis (PCA) is a well-known method for dimensionality reduction and feature extraction while maintaining most of the variation in data. Although PCA has been applied in many areas successfully, it is sensitive to outliers and only valid for Gaussian distributions. Several variants of PCA have been proposed to resolve noise sensitivity and, among the variants, improved robust fuzzy PCA (RF-PCA2) demonstrated promising results. RF-PCA, however, is still a linear algorithm that cannot accommodate non-Gaussian distributions. In this paper, a non-linear algorithm that combines RF-PCA2 and kernel PCA (K-PCA), called improved robust kernel fuzzy PCA (RKF-PCA2), is introduced. The kernel methods make it to accommodate non-Gaussian distributions. RKF-PCA2 inherits noise robustness from RF-PCA2 and non-linearity from K-PCA. RKF-PCA2 outperforms previous methods in handling non-Gaussian distributions in a noise robust way. Experimental results also support this.