Clustering stability-based Evolutionary K-Means

Evolutionary K-Means (EKM), which combines K-Means and genetic algorithm, solves K-Means’ initiation problem by selecting parameters automatically through the evolution of partitions. Currently, EKM algorithms usually choose silhouette index as cluster validity index, and they are effective in clustering well-separated clusters. However, their performance of clustering noisy data is often disappointing. On the other hand, clustering stability-based approaches are more robust to noise; yet, they should start intelligently to find some challenging clusters. It is necessary to join EKM with clustering stability-based analysis. In this paper, we present a novel EKM algorithm that uses clustering stability to evaluate partitions. We firstly introduce two weighted aggregated consensus matrices, positive aggregated consensus matrix (PA) and negative aggregated consensus matrix (NA), to store clustering tendency for each pair of instances. Specifically, PA stores the tendency of sharing the same label and NA stores that of having different labels. Based upon the matrices, clusters and partitions can be evaluated from the view of clustering stability. Then, we propose a clustering stability-based EKM algorithm CSEKM that evolves partitions and the aggregated matrices simultaneously. To evaluate the algorithm’s performance, we compare it with an EKM algorithm, two consensus clustering algorithms, a clustering stability-based algorithm and a multi-index-based clustering approach. Experimental results on a series of artificial datasets, two simulated datasets and eight UCI datasets suggest CSEKM is more robust to noise.