Multilocal Search and Adaptive Niching Based Memetic Algorithm With a Consensus Criterion for Data Clustering

Clustering is deemed one of the most difficult and challenging problems in machine learning. In this paper, we propose a multilocal search and adaptive niching-based genetic algorithm with a consensus criterion for automatic data clustering. The proposed algorithm employs three local searches of different features in a sophisticated manner to efficiently exploit the decision space. Furthermore, we develop an adaptive niching method, which can dynamically adjust its parameter value depending on the problem instance as well as the search progress, and incorporate it into the proposed algorithm. The adaptation strategy is based on a newly devised population diversity index, which can be used to promote both genetic diversity and fitness. Consequently, diverged niches of high fitness can be formed and maintained in the population, making the approach well-suited to effective exploration of the complex decision space of clustering problems. The resulting algorithm has been used to optimize a consensus clustering criterion, which is suggested with the purpose of achieving reliable solutions. To evaluate the proposed algorithm, we have conducted a series of experiments on both synthetic and real data and compared it with other reported methods. The results show that our proposed algorithm can achieve superior performance, outperforming related methods.