A growing partitional clustering based on particle swarm optimization

This paper proposes a growing partitional clustering method based on particle swarm optimization (PSO) namely PSOGC for handling data with non-spherical or non-linearly separable distribution. Particularly, PSOGC uses PSO to optimize the cluster centers. In each iteration of PSO, the particles encoding candidate cluster centers are evolved according to their social and personal knowledge. Given the candidate cluster centers, a growing strategy increasingly absorbs nearby data samples into the corresponding cluster based on k-nearest neighbor graph. The fitness of each particle is evaluated in terms of intra-cluster connectivity and inter-cluster disconnectivity of the resultant clustering. The combination of PSO and growing strategy ensures the stability of global search and the robustness of partition on data of different non-spherical shapes. Experimental results on six synthetic and three UCI real-world data sets demonstrate the efficiency of PSOGC.