A hybrid approach for data clustering based on modified cohort intelligence and K-means

Clustering is an important and popular technique in data mining. It partitions a set of objects in such a manner that objects in the same clusters are more similar to each another than objects in the different cluster according to certain predefined criteria. K-means is simple yet an efficient method used in data clustering. However, K-means has a tendency to converge to local optima and depends on initial value of cluster centers. In the past, many heuristic algorithms have been introduced to overcome this local optima problem. Nevertheless, these algorithms too suffer several short-comings. In this paper, we present an efficient hybrid evolutionary data clustering algorithm referred to as K-MCI, whereby, we combine K-means with modified cohort intelligence. Our proposed algorithm is tested on several standard data sets from UCI Machine Learning Repository and its performance is compared with other well-known algorithms such as K-means, K-means++, cohort intelligence (CI), modified cohort intelligence (MCI), genetic algorithm (GA), simulated annealing (SA), tabu search (TS), ant colony optimization (ACO), honey bee mating optimization (HBMO) and particle swarm optimization (PSO). The simulation results are very promising in the terms of quality of solution and convergence speed of algorithm. 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.