Clustering Ensembles Using Ants Algorithm

Abstract

Cluster ensembles combine different clustering outputs to obtain a better partition of the data. There are two distinct steps in cluster ensembles, generating a set of initial partitions that are different from one another, and combining the partitions via a consensus functions to generate the final partition. Most of the previous consensus functions require the number of clusters to be specified a priori to obtain a good final partition. In this paper we introduce a new consensus function based on the Ant Colony Algorithms, which can automatically determine the number of clusters and produce highly competitive final clusters. In addition, the proposed method provides a natural way to determine outlier and marginal examples in the data. Experimental results on both synthetic and real-world benchmark data sets are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in predicting the number of clusters and generating the final partition as well as detecting outlier and marginal examples from data.