Research on particle swarm optimization based clustering: A systematic review of literature and techniques

Optimization based pattern discovery has emerged as an important field in knowledge discovery and data mining (KDD), and has been used to enhance the efficiency and accuracy of clustering, classification, association rules and outlier detection. Cluster analysis, which identifies groups of similar data items in large datasets, is one of its recent beneficiaries. The increasing complexity and large amounts of data in the datasets have seen data clustering emerge as a popular focus for the application of optimization based techniques. Different optimization techniques have been applied to investigate the optimal solution for clustering problems. Swarm intelligence (SI) is one such optimization technique whose algorithms have successfully been demonstrated as solutions for different data clustering domains. In this paper we investigate the growth of literature in SI and its algorithms, particularly Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). This paper makes two major contributions. Firstly, it provides a thorough literature overview focusing on some of the most cited techniques that have been used for PSO-based data clustering. Secondly, we analyze the reported results and highlight the performance of different techniques against contemporary clustering techniques. We also provide an brief overview of our PSO-based hierarchical clustering approach (HPSO-clustering) and compare the results with traditional hierarchical agglomerative clustering (HAC), K-means, and PSO clustering. & 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.