A tabu search approach for the minimum sum-of-squares clustering problem

In this paper, a tabu search based clustering approach called TS-Clustering is proposed to deal with the minimum sum-of-squares clustering problem. In the TS-Clustering algorithm, five improvement operations and three neighborhood modes are given. The improvement operation is used to enhance the clustering solution obtained in the process of iterations, and the neighborhood mode is used to create the neighborhood of tabu search. The superiority of the proposed method over some known clustering techniques is demonstrated for artificial and real life data sets. (C) 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.