Balancing exploration and exploitation: Unleashing the adaptive power of automatic cuckoo search for meta-heuristic optimization

Abstract

Meta-heuristic optimization algorithms are versatile and efficient techniques for solving complex optimization problems. When applied to clustering algorithms, these algorithms offer numerous advantages over traditional optimization methods, including global search capabilities, iterative refinement processes, robustness to initial conditions, and flexibility in handling diverse clustering objectives and constraints. Employing meta-heuristic optimization in clustering algorithms leads to improved accuracy, scalability, robustness, and flexibility in finding optimal or near-optimal clustering solutions. These algorithms generate new individuals iteratively using nature-inspired operations to obtain high-quality results. However, they often suffer from slower convergence and lack guarantees of finding the best solution for every problem, posing ongoing challenges in algorithm development. This study focuses on addressing the issue of premature convergence in metaheuristic algorithms by introducing an automatic cuckoo search (AuCS) algorithm. The AuCS algorithm aims to strike a balance between exploration and exploitation by dynamically updating the step size in each generation, thereby avoiding premature convergence. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, experiments were conducted on 13 standard benchmark functions and 14 CEC 2005 benchmark functions. In overall performance, AuCS has the best optimum value in 72.22% of cases. This demonstrates the efficacy of the proposed algorithm in achieving improved clustering accuracy and minimizing intra-cluster distance. The proposed AuCS algorithm was applied to data clustering and compared with four swarm optimization algorithms. Here, AuCS outperforms these well-known algorithms in 5 out of 7 datasets. The experimental evaluations in both benchmark functions and clustering problems confirm the promising results of the proposed algorithm, suggesting that AuCS could be considered as a potential improvement over the cuckoo search algorithm.