An Evolutionary Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm for data clustering

Clustering is an important data mining task and has been explored extensively by a number of researchers for different application areas such as finding similarities in images, text data and bio-informatics data. Various optimization techniques have been proposed to improve the performance of clustering algorithms. In this paper we propose a novel algorithm for clustering that we call evolutionary particle swarm optimization (EPSO)-clustering algorithm which is based on PSO. The proposed algorithm is based on the evolution of swarm generations where the particles are initially uniformly distributed in the input data space and after a specified number of iterations; a new generation of the swarm evolves. The swarm tries to dynamically adjust itself after each generation to optimal positions. The paper describes the new algorithm the initial implementation and presents tests performed on real clustering benchmark data. The proposed method is compared with k-means clustering- a benchmark clustering technique and simple particle swarm clustering algorithm. The results show that the algorithm is efficient and produces compact clusters.