Particle Swarm Optimization Based Hierarchical Agglomerative Clustering

Clustering- an important data mining task, which groups the data on the basis of similarities among the data, can be divided into two broad categories, partitional clustering and hierarchal. We combine these two methods and propose a novel clustering algorithm called Hierarchical Particle Swarm Optimization (HPSO) data clustering. The proposed algorithm exploits the swarm intelligence of cooperating agents in a decentralized environment. The experimental results were compared with benchmark clustering techniques, which include K-means, PSO clustering, Hierarchical Agglomerative clustering (HAC) and Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise (DBSCAN). The results are evidence of the effectiveness of Swarm based clustering and the capability to perform clustering in a hierarchical agglomerative manner.