AutoClustering: An estimation of distribution algorithm for the automatic generation of clustering algorithms

Most of the existing Data Mining algorithms have been manually produced, that is, have been developed by a human programmer. A prominent Artificial Intelligence research area is automatic programming - the generation of a computer program by another computer program. Clustering is an important data mining task with many useful real-world applications. Particularly, the class of clustering algorithms based on the idea of data density to identify clusters has many advantages, such as the ability to identify arbitrary-shape clusters. We propose the use of Estimation of Distribution Algorithms for the artificial generation of density-based clustering algorithms. In order to guarantee the generation of valid algorithms, a directed acyclic graph (DAG) was defined where each node represents a procedure (building block) and each edge represents a possible execution sequence between two nodes. The Building Blocks DAG specifies the alphabet of the EDA, that is, any possibly generated algorithm. Preliminary experimental results compare the clustering algorithms artificially generated by AutoClustering to DBSCAN, a well-known manually-designed algorithm.