Aggregation Pheromone Density Based Classification

Social insects like ants, bees deposit pheromone (a type of chemical) in order to communicate between the members of their community. Pheromone, that causes clumping behavior in a species and brings individuals into a closer proximity, is called aggregation pheromone. This article presents a new algorithm (called, APC) for pattern classification based on the property of aggregation pheromone found in natural behavior of real ants. Here each data pattern is considered as an ant, and the training patterns (ants) form several groups or colonies depending on the number of classes present in the data set. A new (test pattern) ant will move along the direction where average aggregation pheromone density (at the location of the new ant) formed due to each colony of ants is higher and hence eventually it will join that colony. Thus each individual test ant will finally join a particular colony. The proposed algorithm is evaluated with a number of benchmark data sets in terms of classification accuracy. Results are compared with other state of the art techniques. Experimental results show the potentiality of the proposed algorithm.