Particle swarm optimization with selective particle regeneration for data clustering

This paper presents selective regeneration particle swarm optimization (SRPSO), a novel algorithm developed based on particle swarm optimization (PSO). It contains two new features, unbalanced parameter setting and particle regeneration operation. The unbalanced parameter setting enables fast convergence of the algorithm and the particle regeneration operation allows the search to escape from local optima and explore for better solutions. This algorithm is applied to data clustering problems for performance evaluation and a hybrid algorithm (KSRPSO) of K-means clustering method and SRPSO is developed. In the conducted numerical experiments, SRPSO and KSRPSO are compared to the original PSO algorithm, K-means, as well as, other methods proposed by other studies. The results demonstrate that SRPSO and KSRPSO are efficient, accurate, and robust methods for data clustering problems. (c) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.