Adaptive Clustering Algorithm by Ants＇ Optimization

Inspired by the swarm intelligence in self-organizing behavior of real ant colonies, various ant-based algorithms were proposed recently for many research fields in data mining such as clustering. Compared with the previous clustering approaches such as K-means, the main advantage of ant-based clustering algorithms is that no additional information is needed, such as the initial partitioning of the data or the number of clusters. In this paper, we present an adaptive ant clustering algorithm ACAD. The algorithm uses a digraph where the vertexes represent the data to be clustered. The weighted edges represent the acceptance rate between the two data it connected. The pheromone on the edges is adaptively updated by the ants passing it. Some edges with less pheromone are progressively removed under a threshold in the process. Strong connected components of the final digraph are extracted as clusters. Experimental results on several real datasets and benchmarks indicate that ACAD is conceptually simpler, more efficient and more robust than previous research such as the classical K-means clustering algorithm and LF algorithm which.is also based on ACO