Pattern Clustering Using a Swarm Intelligence Approach

Clustering aims at representing large datasets by a fewer number of prototypes or clusters. It brings simplicity in modeling data and thus plays a central role in the process of knowledge discovery and data mining. Data mining tasks, in these days, require fast and accurate partitioning of huge datasets, which may come with a variety of attributes or features. This, in turn, imposes severe computational requirements on the relevant clustering techniques. A family of bio-inspired algorithms, well-known as Swarm Intelligence (SI) has recently emerged that meets these requirements and has successfully been applied to a number of real world clustering problems. This chapter explores the role of SI in clustering different kinds of datasets. It finally describes a new SI technique for partitioning a linearly non-separable dataset into an optimal number of clusters in the kernel- induced feature space. Computer simulations undertaken in this research have also been provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.