A new multi-objective differential evolution approach for simultaneous clustering and feature selection

Abstract

Today’s real-world data mostly involves incomplete, inconsistent, and/or irrelevant information that causes many drawbacks to transform it into an understandable format. In order to deal with such issues, data preprocessing is a proven discipline in data mining. One of the typical tasks in data preprocessing, feature selection aims to reduce the dimensionality in the data and thereby contributes to further processing. Feature selection is widely used to enhance the performance of a supervised learning algorithm (e.g., classification) but is rarely used in unsupervised tasks (e.g., clustering). This paper introduces a new multi-objective differential evolution approach in order to find relatively homogeneous clusters without the prior knowledge of cluster number using a smaller number of features from all available features in the data. To analyze the goodness of the introduced approach, several experiments are conducted on a various number of real-world and synthetic benchmarks using a variety of clustering approaches. From the analyzes through several different criteria, it is suggested that our method can significantly improve the clustering performance while reducing the dimensionality at the same time.