Clustering-based Methods Research Articles

ESG sustainable technologies literature review using cluster-based methods

Purpose- This study aims to address the existing gaps in the body of knowledge on sustainable technologies in the Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) field. It achieves this by employing a rigorous systematic review methodology and using VOSviewer and Biblioshiny software to analyze a comprehensive dataset of 1,603 papers from the ABS 2023 journal list, covering various knowledge domains. Methodology- This research undertakes a systematic analysis of the multifaceted ESG domain using a cluster-based approach rooted in bibliographic coupling analysis. This methodology reveals intricate network associations within distinct clusters of ESG literature. The study identifies four significant literature clusters: sustainable financial technology (FinTech), sustainable artificial intelligence (AI), sustainable big data, and sustainable cryptocurrency. Findings- The analysis conducted in this study reveals four distinct clusters of literature within the ESG field, shedding light on the interconnectedness of these areas. The identified clusters are sustainable financial technology (FinTech), sustainable artificial intelligence (AI), sustainable big data, and sustainable cryptocurrency. Each cluster represents a specific facet of ESG and provides valuable insights into its individual development and interrelationships. Conclusion- This research offers valuable insights into the state of knowledge in the ESG field, providing a well-structured understanding of the ESG landscape. It not only highlights the key clusters of literature but also offers a qualitative analysis, providing researchers with a roadmap for exploring research opportunities and specific areas within the ESG literature. By identifying these clusters and their relationships, this study contributes to the advancement of sustainable technologies within the ESG domain and sets the stage for future research in this evolving field. Keywords: ESG, sustainability, financial technology, artificial intelligence, big data, cryptocurrency, Cluster analysis. JEL Codes: G34, G38, G39

High-Performance Technique for Item Recommendation in Social Networks using Multiview Clustering

Recommender Systems have been widely employed in information systems over the past few decades, making it easier for each user to choose their own products based on their past behaviour. Data mining tasks and visualization tools regularly use clustering techniques in the scientific and commercial arenas. It has been shown that clustering-based methods are effective and scalable to big data sets. The accuracy and coverage of clustering-based recommender systems are, however, somewhat low. In this paper, we suggest an improved multi-view clustering method for the recommendation of items in social networks to overcome these problems. To create better partitions, the artificial Bees colony optimization algorithm (ABC) is first used to improve the initial medoids’ selection. After that, users are clustered iteratively using views of both rating patterns as well as social information using multiview clustering (MVC) (i.e. trust and friendships). Ultimately, a framework is suggested for evaluating the various options. This research study suggests a novel MVC clustering approach using the ABC optimization technique. The proposed ABC-MVC algorithm’s usefulness in terms of enhancing accuracy is demonstrated by experimental findings performed on a real-world dataset and it is observed that it performs better than the pre-existing techniques and baselines.

Community-Enhanced Contrastive Learning for Graph Collaborative Filtering

Graph collaborative filtering can efficiently find the hidden interests of users for recommender systems in recent years. This method can learn complex interactions between nodes in the graph, identify user preferences, and provide satisfactory recommendations. However, recommender systems face the challenge of data sparsity. To address this, recent studies have utilized contrastive learning to make use of unlabeled data structures. However, the existing positive and negative example sampling methods are not reasonable. Random-based or data augmentation-based sampling cannot make use of useful latent information. Clustering-based sampling methods ignore the semantics of node features and the relationship between global and local information. To utilize the latent structures in the data, we introduce a novel Community-Enhanced Contrastive Learning method to help the recommendation main task called CECL which uses a community detection algorithm to sample examples with semantic and global information, using both known and hidden community connections in the bipartite interaction graph. Extensive experiments are conducted on two well-known datasets, the results of which show a 12% and 8% performance improvement compared to that of the existing baseline methods.

A Comprehensive Survey on Model Quantization for Deep Neural Networks in Image Classification

Recent advancements in machine learning achieved by Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have been significant. While demonstrating high accuracy, DNNs are associated with a huge number of parameters and computations, which leads to high memory usage and energy consumption. As a result, deploying DNNs on devices with constrained hardware resources poses significant challenges. To overcome this, various compression techniques have been widely employed to optimize DNN accelerators. A promising approach is quantization, in which the full-precision values are stored in low bit-width precision. Quantization not only reduces memory requirements but also replaces high-cost operations with low-cost ones. DNN quantization offers flexibility and efficiency in hardware design, making it a widely adopted technique in various methods. Since quantization has been extensively utilized in previous works, there is a need for an integrated report that provides an understanding, analysis, and comparison of different quantization approaches. Consequently, we present a comprehensive survey of quantization concepts and methods, with a focus on image classification. We describe clustering-based quantization methods and explore the use of a scale factor parameter for approximating full-precision values. Moreover, we thoroughly review the training of a quantized DNN, including the use of a straight-through estimator and quantization regularization. We explain the replacement of floating-point operations with low-cost bitwise operations in a quantized DNN and the sensitivity of different layers in quantization. Furthermore, we highlight the evaluation metrics for quantization methods and important benchmarks in the image classification task. We also present the accuracy of the state-of-the-art methods on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet. This article attempts to make the readers familiar with the basic and advanced concepts of quantization, introduce important works in DNN quantization, and highlight challenges for future research in this field.

A Diversity-Based Synthetic Oversampling Using Clustering for Handling Extreme Imbalance

Imbalanced data are typically observed in many real-life classification problems. However, mainstream machine learning algorithms are mostly designed with the underlying assumption of a relatively well-balanced distribution of classes. The mismatch between reality and algorithm assumption results in a deterioration of classification performance. One form of approach to address this problem is through re-sampling methods, although its effectiveness is limited; most re-sampling methods fail to consider the distribution of minority and majority instances and the diversity within synthetically generated data. Diversity becomes increasingly important when minority data becomes more sparse, as each data point becomes more valuable. They should all be considered during the generation process instead of being regarded as noise. In this paper, we propose a cluster-based diversity re-sampling method, combined with NOAH algorithm. Neighbourhood-based Clustering Diversity Over-sampling (NBCDO) is introduced with the aim to complement our previous cluster-based diversity algorithm Density-based Clustering Diversity Over-sampling (DBCDO). It first uses a neighbourhood-based clustering algorithm to consider the distribution of both minority and majority class instances, before applying NOAH algorithm to encourage diversity optimisation during the generation of synthetic instances. We demonstrate the implementation of both cluster-based diversity methods by conducting experiments over 10 real-life datasets with ≤ 5% imbalance ratio and show that our proposed cluster-based diversity algorithm (NBCDO, DBCDO) brings performance improvements over its comparable methods (DB-SMOTE, MAHAKIL, KMEANS-SMOTE, MC-SMOTE).

Towards reduction of bending-extension coupling in unsymmetrical laminates using multi-objective heat transfer search

The main advantage of composite materials is the ability to tailor the properties of stacking sequences. Unsymmetrical laminate involves an arbitrary even or odd number of fiber layers oriented at different angles wherein identical fiber orientation above and below mid-surface does not exist. In the case of these laminates, the coupling deformation is undesired during mechanical loads and symmetrical laminates may not be the best solution for all cases. In this work, an effort has been made to present the methodology to minimize the end effects of bending-extension coupling in the case of unsymmetrical laminates to make it widely applicable. The infinite plate containing the circular and elliptical hole is studied with various in-plane loading conditions. The end effect of bending-extension coupling is presented by the multi-objective problem of minimization of the normalized tangential force and moment. The non-dominated sorting heat transfer search algorithm is employed to solve this optimization problem wherein TOPSIS decision-making technique is used to obtain the best values from the Pareto solution. The different cluster-based methods are proposed to utilize the unsymmetrical laminates most effectively. The effects of these clusters on the bending-extensional coupling are investigated and results reveal that cluster design presenting each fiber angle value distinctly is the best design among all recommended in the present investigation. More than 70% of the bending-extensional coupling is reduced in most cases. A unique correlation is found between the cluster design and fiber angles of the optimum stacking sequences. The proposed approach and designs will support the potential use of unsymmetrical laminates by improving properties through tailoring stacking sequences.

Forecasting flexibility of charging of electric vehicles: Tree and cluster-based methods

Scheduling electric vehicle charging sessions allows to aggregate flexibility in order to minimize energy costs and reduce congestion in the electricity grid. Existing research shows that user input for energy and parking duration does not serve as a reliable prediction. The study presents an evaluation of the forecast error and computational performance of the different models. Two main methods are investigated: tree-based (gradient boosted trees LightGBM) and cluster-based (Gaussian mixture model). We also present a novel dynamic cluster-based method, the Similar Sessions method, which employs the similarity between charging sessions based on numerical variables. The results highlight the importance of selecting the forecast model influenced by the availability of training data. The effect of user registration on the accuracy of the forecast is investigated. The tests are run using ACN-Data dataset of Electric Vehicle charging sessions in California, United States. While underperforming on a small dataset with a short look-back period, tree-based methods show superiority while the charging data are accumulating. The Similar Sessions method shows superior accuracy under various data availability conditions. The proposed method requires no prior training, but has slower computational performance in deployment.

Blueprint Separable Subsampling and Aggregate Feature Conformer-Based End-to-End Neural Diarization

At present, a prevalent approach to speaker diarization is clustering based on speaker embeddings. However, this method encounters two primary issues. Firstly, it cannot directly minimize the diarization error during the training process; secondly, the majority of clustering-based methods struggle to handle speaker overlap in audio. A viable approach for addressing these issues involves adopting end-to-end speaker diarization (EEND). Nevertheless, training this EEND system generally requires lengthy audio inputs, which must be downsampled to allow efficient model processing. In this study, we develop a novel downsampling layer using blueprint separable convolution (BSConv) instead of depthwise separable convolution (DSC) as the foundational convolutional unit, which effectively preserves information from the original audio. Furthermore, we incorporate multi-scale feature aggregation (MFA) into the encoder structure to combine the features extracted by each conformer block to the output layer, consequently enhancing the expressiveness of the model’s feature extraction. Lastly, we employ the conformer as the backbone network to incorporate the proposed enhancements, resulting in an EEND system named BSAC-EEND. We assess our suggested methodology on both simulated and real datasets. The experiment indicates that our proposed EEND system reduces diarization error rate (DER) by an average of 17.3% for two-speaker datasets and 12.8% for three-speaker datasets compared to the baseline.

Improving collaborative recommender system using hybrid clustering and optimized singular value decomposition

In the era of internet and big data, recommender systems are necessary to filter out useless information. Collaborative filtering (CF) is one of the most successful technique used in recommender systems, this technique suffers from a large number of users and items, or the scalability issue. In this paper, a new hybrid method based on K-means clustering (KM) and Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) which uses evolutionary algorithms is proposed to deal with scalability issue. On the one hand, KM optimized by Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and denoising by Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise (DBSCAN) is used to cluster users and reduce the number of comparisons between the target user and other users. On the other hand, SVD optimized by Genetic Algorithm (GA) is used to reduce the number of items. The proposed method is assessed on three standard datasets and the results are compared with basic CF and other extended versions that use clustering algorithms, evolutionary algorithms and dimensionality reduction techniques. The results show that our proposed method performed better than other methods in terms of precision, recall and MAE, and the scalability problem was improved by reducing the time complexity. Also, the combined clustering method was optimized in terms of Davies-Bouldin and the Dunn's index compared to the basic clustering methods.

OPM2L: An optimal instance partition-based multi-metric learning method for heterogeneous dataset classification

Multi-metric learning -a method to learn multiple local metrics to reveal the feature's correlations of samples from different local regions-has become an essential tool to measure the similarities between instances from heterogeneous datasets. However, most existing cluster-based MML methods first partition the training data with a predefined metric and then learn multiple metrics via the local instances, leading to these two independent procedures fail to cooperate with each other. In this paper, we propose an Optimal instance Partition-based Multi-Metric Learning (OPM2L) method for heterogeneous dataset classification by unifying the instance partition and multiple local metrics learning into a single objective. In particular, multiple anchor centers together with a global metric are employed to assist the instance partition process. During the training, the shared information contained in local metrics is aggregated into the global metric by a dedicated regularizer, which improves the instance partition process and offers the subsequent multiple local metrics learning with more informative instances. Moreover, an efficient alternating direction technology is employed to seek a feasible solution to the proposed method. We further confirmed that the sub-problems can be settled with closed-form solutions, while the superiority of the proposed method is also proved by experimental results on extensive datasets.

Adaptive Refining-Aggregation-Separation Framework for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Semantic Segmentation

Unsupervised domain adaptation has attracted widespread attention as a promising method to solve the labeling difficulties of semantic segmentation tasks. It trains a segmentation network for unlabeled real target images using easily available labeled virtual source images. To improve performance, clustering is used to obtain domain-invariant feature representations. However, most clustering-based methods indiscriminately cluster all features mapped by category from both domains, causing the centroid shift and affecting the generation of discriminative features. We propose a novel clustering-based method that uses an adaptive refining-aggregation-separation framework, which learns the discriminative features by designing different adaptive schemes for different domains and features. The clustering does not require any tunable thresholds. To estimate more accurate domain-invariant centroids, we design different ways to guide the adaptive refinement of different domain features. A critic is proposed to directly evaluate the confidence of target features to solve the absence of target labels. We introduce a domain-balanced aggregation loss and two adaptive separation losses for distance and similarity respectively, which can discriminate clustering features by combining the refinement strategy to improve segmentation performance. Experimental results on GTA5→Cityscapes and SYNTHIA→Cityscapes benchmarks show that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.

Searching Density-Increasing Path to Local Density Peaks for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection

Unsupervised anomaly detection (AD) is a challenging problem in the data mining community. Clustering-based AD methods aim to group normal data points into clusters and then regard a point belonging to none of the clusters as an anomaly. However, they may suffer from the problems of unknown cluster numbers and arbitrary cluster shapes. This paper presents a novel clustering-based AD method named Density-increasing Path (DIP) to tackle these challenges. DIP searches a path for each data point. The path starts at the data point itself, passes through several points with monotonically increasing densities, and ends at a density peak. Further, DIP defines the climbing difficulty of each path by combining the distance and density increment of each step along the path, which can be regarded as the anomaly score of the path starting point. DIP can adaptively decide the number of peaks to address the challenge of unknown cluster numbers. Since DIP requires the path to pass several points rather than directly reaching the peak, it handles arbitrary cluster shapes. We also propose the ensemble DIP to improve prediction accuracy. The experimental results on four synthetic datasets and eleven real-world benchmarks demonstrate that DIP outperforms existing methods.

Region-Aware Hierarchical Latent Feature Representation Learning-Guided Clustering for Hyperspectral Band Selection.

Hyperspectral band selection aims to identify an optimal subset of bands for hyperspectral images (HSIs). For most existing clustering-based band selection methods, they directly stretch each band into a single feature vector and employ the pixelwise features to address band redundancy. In this way, they do not take full consideration of the spatial information and deal with the importance of different regions in HSIs, which leads to a nonoptimal selection. To address these issues, a region-aware hierarchical latent feature representation learning-guided clustering (HLFC) method is proposed. Specifically, in order to fully preserve the spatial information of HSIs, the superpixel segmentation algorithm is adopted to segment HSIs into multiple regions first. For each segmented region, the similarity graph is constructed to reflect the bands-wise similarity, and its corresponding Laplacian matrix is generated for learning low-dimensional latent features in a hierarchical way. All latent features are then fused to form a unified feature representation of HSIs. Finally, k -means clustering is utilized on the unified feature representation matrix to generate multiple clusters from which the band with maximum information entropy is selected to form the final subset of bands. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed clustering method can achieve superior performance than the state-of-the-art representative methods on the band selection. The demo code of this work is publicly available at https://github.com/WangJun2023/HLFC.

End-to-end neural speaker diarization with an iterative adaptive attractor estimation

End-to-end neural diarization (EEND) which has the capability to directly output speaker diarization results and handle overlapping speech has attracted more and more attention due to its promising performance. Although existing EEND-based methods often outperform clustering-based methods, they cannot generalize well to unseen test sets because fixed attractors are often utilized to estimate speech activities of each speaker. An iterative adaptive attractor estimation (IAAE) network was proposed to refine diarization results, in which the self-attentive EEND (SA-EEND) was implemented to initialize diarization results and frame-wise embeddings. There are two main parts in the proposed IAAE network: an attention-based pooling was designed to obtain a rough estimation of the attractors based on the diarization results of the previous iteration, and an adaptive attractor was then calculated by using transformer decoder blocks. A unified training framework was proposed to further improve the diarization performance, making the embeddings more discriminable based on the well separated attractors. We evaluated the proposed method on both the simulated mixtures and the real CALLHOME dataset using the diarization error rate (DER). Our proposed method provides relative reductions in DER by up to 44.8% on simulated 2-speaker mixtures and 23.6% on the CALLHOME dataset over the baseline SA-EEND at the 2nd iteration step. We also demonstrated that with an increasing number of refinement steps applied, the DER on the CALLHOME dataset could be further reduced to 7.36%, achieving the state-of-the-art diarization results when compared with other methods.

Hybrid Multi-Label Classification Model for Medical Applications Based on Adaptive Synthetic Data and Ensemble Learning.

In recent years, both machine learning and computer vision have seen growth in the use of multi-label categorization. SMOTE is now being utilized in existing research for data balance, and SMOTE does not consider that nearby examples may be from different classes when producing synthetic samples. As a result, there can be more class overlap and more noise. To avoid this problem, this work presented an innovative technique called Adaptive Synthetic Data-Based Multi-label Classification (ASDMLC). Adaptive Synthetic (ADASYN) sampling is a sampling strategy for learning from unbalanced data sets. ADASYN weights minority class instances by learning difficulty. For hard-to-learn minority class cases, synthetic data are created. Their numerical variables are normalized with the help of the Min-Max technique to standardize the magnitude of each variable's impact on the outcomes. The values of the attribute in this work are changed to a new range, from 0 to 1, using the normalization approach. To raise the accuracy of multi-label classification, Velocity-Equalized Particle Swarm Optimization (VPSO) is utilized for feature selection. In the proposed approach, to overcome the premature convergence problem, standard PSO has been improved by equalizing the velocity with each dimension of the problem. To expose the inherent label dependencies, the multi-label classification ensemble of Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS), Probabilistic Neural Network (PNN), and Clustering-Based Decision tree methods will be processed based on an averaging method. The following criteria, including precision, recall, accuracy, and error rate, are used to assess performance. The suggested model's multi-label classification accuracy is 90.88%, better than previous techniques, which is PCT, HOMER, and ML-Forest is 65.57%, 70.66%, and 82.29%, respectively.

Fuzzy set-based Bernoulli Random Noise Weighted Loss for unsupervised person re-identification

Clustering-based methods have achieved impressive performance on unsupervised person ReID task. However, most of these models suffer from noisy labels. In this paper, we propose a novel method to evaluate and suppress noisy labels. Since the feature network is barely trained and the clustering results are unreliable consequently, noisy samples can be hardly screened out with a hard threshold in the early stage of training. To address this issue, we construct a Noisy Label Fuzzy Set (NLFS) whose membership function can be used to evaluate the noise level of each sample. Furthermore, we propose a new loss function, referred to as Bernoulli Random Noise Weighted Loss (BRNWL), with which some samples with higher noise membership will be recognized as noisy samples in higher probability and assigned with corresponding weights to limit their contributions to the training. Through above improvements, randomness is introduced into the alternating update between the feature network and the clustering results, which can effectively prevent the model from trapping into local minima or vicious circles. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on popular ReID datasets.

Automated contour extraction for light-sheet microscopy images of zebrafish embryos based on object edge detection algorithm.

Embryo contour extraction is the initial step in the quantitative analysis of embryo morphology, and it is essential for understanding the developmental process. Recent developments in light-sheet microscopy have enabled the in toto time-lapse imaging of embryos, including zebrafish. However, embryo contour extraction from images generated via light-sheet microscopy is challenging owing to the large amount of data and the variable sizes, shapes, and textures of objects. In this report, we provide a workflow for extracting the contours of zebrafish blastula and gastrula without contour labeling of an embryo. This workflow is based on the edge detection method using a change point detection approach. We assessed the performance of the edge detection method and compared it with widely used edge detection and segmentation methods. The results showed that the edge detection accuracy of the proposed method wassuperior to those of the Sobel, Laplacian of Gaussian, adaptive threshold, Multi Otsu, and k-means clustering-based methods, and the noise robustness of the proposed method was superior to those of the Multi Otsu and k-means clustering-based methods. The proposed workflow was shown to be useful for automating small-scale contour extractions of zebrafish embryos that cannot be specifically labeled owing to constraints, such as the availability of microscopic channels. This workflow may offer an option for contour extraction when deep learning-based approaches or existing non-deep learning-based methods cannot be applied.

Study on Single-Tree Extraction Method for Complex RGB Point Cloud Scenes

With the development of sensor technology and point cloud generation techniques, there has been an increasing amount of high-quality forest RGB point cloud data. However, popular clustering-based point cloud segmentation methods are usually only suitable for pure forest scenes and not ideal for scenes with multiple ground features or complex terrain. Therefore, this study proposes a single-tree point cloud extraction method that combines deep semantic segmentation and clustering. This method first uses a deep semantic segmentation network, Improved-RandLA-Net, which is developed based on RandLA-Net, to extract point clouds of specified tree species by adding an attention chain to improve the model’s ability to extract channel and spatial features. Subsequently, clustering is employed to extract single-tree point clouds from the segmented point clouds. The feasibility of the proposed method was verified in the Gingko site, the Lin’an Pecan site, and a Fraxinus excelsior site in a conference center. Finally, semantic segmentation was performed on three sample areas using pre- and postimproved RandLA-Net. The experiments demonstrate that Improved-RandLA-Net had significant improvements in Accuracy, Precision, Recall, and F1 score. At the same time, based on the semantic segmentation results of Improved-RandLA-Net, single-tree point clouds of three sample areas were extracted, and the final single-tree recognition rates for each sample area were 89.80%, 75.00%, and 95.39%, respectively. The results demonstrate that our proposed method can effectively extract single-tree point clouds in complex scenes.

Joint Learning of Correlation-Constrained Fuzzy Clustering and Discriminative Non-Negative Representation for Hyperspectral Band Selection

Hyperspectral band selection plays an important role in overcoming the curse of dimensionality. Recently, clustering-based band selection methods have shown promise in the selection of informative and representative bands from hyperspectral images (HSIs). However, most existing clustering-based band selection methods involve the clustering of original HSIs, limiting their performance because of the high dimensionality of hyperspectral bands. To tackle this problem, a novel hyperspectral band selection method termed joint learning of correlation-constrained fuzzy clustering and discriminative non-negative representation for hyperspectral band selection (CFNR) is presented. In CFNR, graph regularized non-negative matrix factorization (GNMF) and constrained fuzzy C-means (FCM) are integrated into a unified model to perform clustering on the learned feature representation of bands rather than on the original high-dimensional data. Specifically, the proposed CFNR aims to learn the discriminative non-negative representation of each band for clustering by introducing GNMF into the model of the constrained FCM and making full use of the intrinsic manifold structure of HSIs. Moreover, based on the band correlation property of HSIs, a correlation constraint, which enforces the similarity of clustering results between neighboring bands, is imposed on the membership matrix of FCM in the CFNR model to obtain clustering results that meet the needs of band selection. The alternating direction multiplier method is adopted to solve the joint optimization model. Compared with existing methods, CFNR can obtain a more informative and representative band subset, thus can improve the reliability of hyperspectral image classifications. Experimental results on five real hyperspectral datasets demonstrate that CFNR can achieve superior performance compared with several state-of-the-art methods.

An advanced fuzzy C-Means algorithm for the tissue segmentation from brain magnetic resonance images in the presence of noise and intensity inhomogeneity

ABSTRACT Segmentation of brain Magnetic Resonance Images (MRIs) into various brain tissues such as white matter (WM), grey matter (GM), and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) is very important to detect and diagnose different brain-related disorders at the primitive level. Accurate segmentation of brain MRIs is very difficult because of the intricate anatomical structure of the tissues, the existence of Intensity Inhomogeneity (IIH), noise, and Partial Volume Effects (PVE). Clustering-based methods are generally used to segment brain images. This work proposes a Chaotic based Enhanced Firefly Algorithm Integrated with Fuzzy C-Means (CEFAFCM) for the segmentation of brain tissues WM, GM, and CSF from brain MRIs. The proposed method can handle IIH, PVE, and noise. CEFAFCM is a spatially modified FCM algorithm combined with the Firefly Algorithm (FA) along with a chaotic map for the initialization of the population of fireflies. The algorithm is tested with brain MRIs acquired from the BrainWeb database. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed technique is producing better results in comparison with some existing brain MRI segmentation methods such as FCM, BCFCM, FAFCM, and En-FAFCM.