The RCM algorithm may lead to undesirable solutions in practice because the points close to data points being assigned are neglected which led to the development of the decision theoretic rough set (DTRS) model and the decision theoretic rough C-means algorithm (DTRCM). It was recently improved further with the introduction of decision theoretic rough fuzzy C-means (DTRFCM). Here, we present a further improved algorithm called the decision theoretic intuitionistic fuzzy rough C-means (DTRIFCM) and provide a comparative performance analysis of DTRCM, DTRFCM and DTRIFCM through experiments and efficiency measuring indices DB, D and Acc. According to DB and D indexes DTRIFCM is better than the other two, where as far as the accuracy is concerned DTRFCM is better. We have chosen the data sets Iris, Wine, WDBC and Glass from UCI repository as input for the experimental purpose. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016.