Combining PSO and k-means to enhance data clustering

In this paper we propose a clustering method based on combination of the particle swarm optimization (PSO) and the k-mean algorithm. PSO algorithm was showed to successfully converge during the initial stages of a global search, but around global optimum, the search process will become very slow. On the contrary, k-means algorithm can achieve faster convergence to optimum solution. At the same time, the convergent accuracy for k-means can be higher than PSO. So in this paper, a hybrid algorithm combining particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm with k-means algorithm is proposed we refer to it as PSO-KM algorithm. The algorithm aims to group a given set of data into a user specified number of clusters. We evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm using five datasets. The algorithm performance is compared to K-means and PSO clustering.