Immune K-means and negative selection algorithms for data analysis

During the last decade artificial immune systems have drawn much of the researchers' attention. All the work that has been done allowed to develop many interesting algorithms which come in useful when solving engineering problems such as data mining and analysis, anomaly detection and many others. Being constantly developed and improved, the algorithms based on immune metaphors have some limitations, though. In this paper we elaborate on the concept of a novel artificial immune algorithm by considering the possibility of combining the clonal selection principle and the well known K-means algorithm. This novel approach and a new way of performing suppression (based on the usefulness of the evolving lymphocytes) in clonal selection result in a very effective and stable immune algorithm for both unsupervised and supervised learning. Further improvements to the cluster analysis by means of the proposed algorithm, immune K-means, are introduced. Different methods for clusters construction are compared, together with multi-point cluster validity index and a novel strategy based on minimal spanning tree (mst) and a analysis of the midpoints of the edges of the (mst). Interesting and useful improvements of the proposed approach by means of negative selection algorithms are proposed and discussed.