The best-so-far ABC with multiple patrilines for clustering problems

Clustering is an important process in many application domains such as machine learning, data mining, pattern recognition, image analysis, information retrieval, and bioinformatics. The main objective of clustering is to search for hidden patterns that may exist in datasets. Since the clustering problem is considered to be NP-hard, previous research has applied bio-inspired heuristic methods to solve such problems. In this paper we propose an effective method for clustering using an algorithm inspired by the decision making processes of bee swarms. The algorithm is called the Best-so-far Artificial Bee Colony with multiple patrilines. In the Best-so-far method, the solution direction is biased toward the Best-so-far solution rather than a neighboring solution proposed in the original Artificial Bee Colony algorithm. We introduce another bee-inspired concept called multiple patrilines to further improve the diversity of solutions and allow the calculations to be distributed among multiple computing units. We empirically assess the performance of our proposed method on several standard datasets taken from the UCI Machine Learning Repository. The results show that the proposed method produces solutions that are as good as or better than the current state-of-the-art clustering techniques reported in the literature. Furthermore, to demonstrate the computing performance and scalability of the algorithm, we assess the algorithm on a large disk drive manufacturing dataset. The results indicate that our distributed Best-so-far approach is scalable and produces good solutions while significantly improving the processing time. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.