PSO Clustering Algorithm Based on Cooperative Evolution

Among the bio-inspired techniques, PSO-based clustering algorithms have received special attention. An improved method named Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) clustering algorithm based on cooperative evolution with multi-populations was presented.It adopts cooperative evolutionary strategy with multi-populations to change the mode of traditional searching optimum solutions. It searches the local optimum and updates the whole best position (gBest) and local best position (pBest) ceaselessly. The gBest will be passed in all sub-populations. When the gBest meets the precision, the evolution will terminate. The whole clustering process is divided into two stages. The first stage uses the cooperative evolutionary PSO algorithm to search the initial clustering centre.The second stage uses the K-means algorithm. The experiment results demontrate that this method can extract the correct number of clusters with good clustering quality compared with the results obtained from other clustering algorithms.