A new clustering approach based on Glowworm Swarm Optimization

High-quality clustering techniques are required for the effective analysis of the growing data. Clustering is a common data mining technique used to analyze homogeneous data instance groups based on their specifications. The clustering based nature-inspired optimization algorithms have received much attention as they have the ability to find better solutions for clustering analysis problems. Glowworm Swarm Optimization (GSO) is a recent nature-inspired optimization algorithm that simulates the behavior of the lighting worms. GSO algorithm is useful for a simultaneous search of multiple solutions, having different or equal objective function values. In this paper, a clustering based GSO is proposed (CGSO), where the GSO is adjusted to solve the data clustering problem to locate multiple optimal centroids based on the multimodal search capability of the GSO. The CGSO process ensures that the similarity between the cluster members is maximized and the similarity among members from different clusters is minimized. Furthermore, three special fitness functions are proposed to evaluate the goodness of the GSO individuals in achieving high quality clusters. The proposed algorithm is tested by artificial and real-world data sets. The better performance of our proposed algorithm over four popular clustering algorithms is demonstrated on most data sets. The results reveal that CGSO can efficiently be used for data clustering.