Fuzzy clustering of time series data: A particle swarm optimization approach

With rapid development in information gathering technologies and access to large amounts of data, we always require methods for data analyzing and extracting useful information from large raw dataset and data mining is an important method for solving this problem. Clustering analysis as the most commonly used function of data mining, has attracted many researchers in computer science. Because of different applications, the problem of clustering the time series data has become highly popular and many algorithms have been proposed in this field. Recently Swarm Intelligence (SI) as a family of nature inspired algorithms has gained huge popularity in the field of pattern recognition and clustering. In this paper, a technique for clustering time series data using a particle swarm optimization (PSO) approach has been proposed, and Pearson Correlation Coefficient as one of the most commonly-used distance measures for time series is considered. The proposed technique is able to find (near) optimal cluster centers during the clustering process. To reduce the dimensionality of the search space and improve the performance of the proposed method, a singular value decomposition (SVD) representation of cluster centers is considered. Experimental results over three popular data sets indicate the superiority of the proposed technique in comparing with fuzzy C-means and fuzzy K-medoids clustering techniques.