Determination of Optimal Clusters Using a Genetic Algorithm

Abstract

Clustering is a potential tool of data mining. A clustering method analyzes the pattern of a data set and groups the data into several clusters based on the similarity among themselves. Clusters may be either crisp or fuzzy in nature. The present chapter deals with clustering of some data sets using Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) algorithm and Entropy-based Fuzzy Clustering (EFC) algorithm. In FCM algorithm, the nature and quality of clusters depend on the pre-defined number of clusters, level of cluster fuzziness and a threshold value utilized for obtaining the number of outliers (if any). On the other hand, the quality of clusters obtained by the EFC algorithm is dependent on a constant used to establish the relationship between the distance and similarity of two data points, a threshold value of similarity and another threshold value used for determining the number of outliers. The clusters should ideally be distinct and at the same time compact in nature. Moreover, the number of outliers should be as minimum as possible. Thus, the above problem may be posed as an optimization problem, which will be solved using a Genetic Algorithm (GA). The best set of multi-dimensional clusters will be mapped into 2-D for visualization using a Self-Organizing Map (SOM).