CLUSTERING WITH EVOLUTION STRATEGIES

The applicability of evolution strategies (ESs), population based stochastic optimization techniques, to optimize clustering objective functions is explored. Clustering objective functions are categorized into centroid and non-centroid type of functions. Optimization of the centroid type of objective functions is accomplished by formulating them as functions of real-valued parameters using ESs. Both hard and fuzzy clustering objective functions are considered in this study. Applicability of ESs to discrete optimization problems is extended to optimize the non-centroid type of objective functions. As ESs are amenable to parallelization, a parallel model (master/slave model) is described in the context of the clustering problem. Results obtained for selected data sets substantiate the utility of ESs in clustering.