Data Clustering Using Multi-objective Differential Evolution Algorithms

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Suresh, Kaushik | Kundu, Debarati | Ghosh, Sayan | Das, Swagatam | Abraham, Ajith

Affiliations: Department of Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India | School of Computer Science, Dalian Maritime University, 116024 Dalian, China and Machine Intelligence Research Labs (MIR Labs) Scientific Network for Innovation and Research Excellence, USA. E-mail: ajith.abraham@ieee.org

Abstract: The article considers the task of fuzzy clustering in a multi-objective optimization (MO) framework. It compares the relative performance of four recently developedmulti-objective variants of Differential Evolution (DE) on over the fuzzy clustering problem, where two conflicting fuzzy validity indices are simultaneously optimized. The resultant Pareto optimal set of solutions from each algorithm consists of a number of non-dominated solutions, from which the user can choose the most promising ones according to the problem specifications. A real-coded representation for the candidates is used for DE. A comparative study of four DE variants with two most well-known MO clustering techniques, namely the NSGA II (Non Dominated Sorting GA) and MOCK (Multi- Objective Clustering with an unknown number of clusters K) is also undertaken. Experimental results reported for six artificial and four real life datasets (including a microarray dataset of budding yeast) of varying range of complexities indicates that DE can serve as a promising algorithm for devising MO clustering techniques.

Keywords: Differential Evolution, Multi-objective optimization, Fuzzy clustering, Micro-array data clustering

DOI: 10.3233/FI-2009-208

Journal: Fundamenta Informaticae, vol. 97, no. 4, pp. 381-403, 2009