Evolutionary multi-objective clustering for overlapping clusters detection

Abstract

Evolutionary algorithms have a history of being applied into clustering analysis. However, most of the existing evolutionary clustering techniques fail to detect complex/spiral-shaped clusters. In our previous works, we proposed several evolutionary multi-objective clustering algorithms and achieved promising results. Still, they suffer from this usual problem exhibited by evolutionary and unsupervised clustering approaches. In this paper, we proposed an improved multi-objective evolutionary clustering approach (EMCOC) to resolve the overlapping problems in complex shape data. Experimental results based on several artificial and real-world data show that the proposed EMCOC can successfully identify overlapping clusters. It also succeeds obtaining non-dominated and near-optimal clustering solutions in terms of different cluster quality measures and classification performance. The superiority of the EMCOC over some other multi-objective evolutionary clustering algorithms is also confirmed by the experimental results.