Cooperative bare-bone particle swarm optimization for data clustering

Cooperative coevolution (CC) was used to improve the performance of evolutionary algorithms (EAs) on complex optimization problems in a divide-and-conquer way. In this paper, we show that the CC framework can be very helpful to improve the performance of particle swarm optimization (PSO) on clustering high-dimensional datasets. Based on CC framework, the original partitional clustering problem is first decomposed to several subproblems, each of which is then evolved by an optimizer independently. We employ a very simple but efficient optimization algorithm, namely bare-bone particle swarm optimization (BPSO), as the optimizer to solve each subproblem cooperatively. In addition, we design a new centroid-based encoding schema for each particle and apply the Chernoff bounds to decide a proper population size. The experimental results on synthetic and real-life datasets illustrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the BPSO and CC framework. The comparisons show the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms five EA-based clustering algorithms, i.e., PSO, SRPSO, ACO, ABC and DE, and K-means on most of the datasets.