A novel Chinese herbal medicine clustering algorithm via artificial bee colony optimization

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has become popular and been viewed as an effective clinical treatment across the world. Accordingly, there is an ever-increasing interest in performing data analysis over TCM data. Aiming to cope with the problem of excessively depending on empirical values when selecting cluster centers by traditional clustering algorithms, an improved artificial bee colony algorithm is proposed by which to automatically select cluster centers and apply it to aggregate Chinese herbal medicines. The proposed method integrates the following new techniques: (1) improving the artificial bee colony algorithm by applying a new searching strategy of neighbour nectar, (2) employing the improved artificial bee colony algorithm to optimize the parameters of the cutoff distance d(c) the local density rho(i) and the minimum distance delta(i) between the element i and any other element with higher density in the cluster algorithm by fast search and finding of density peaks (called DP algorithm) to find the optimal cluster centers, in order to clustering herbal medicines in an accurate fashion with the guarantee of runtime performance. Extensive experiments were conducted on the UCI benchmark datasets and the TCM datasets and the results verify the effectiveness of the proposed method by comparing it with classical clustering algorithms including K-means, K-mediods and DBSCAN in multiple evaluation metrics, that is, Silhouette Coefficient, Entropy, Purity, Precision, Recall and Fl-Measure. The results show that the IABC-DP algorithm outperforms other approaches with good clustering quality and accuracy on the UCI and the TCM datasets as well. In addition, it can be found that the improved artificial bee colony algorithm can effectively reduce the number of iterations when compared to the traditional bee colony algorithm. In particular, the IABC-DP algorithm is applied to cluster multi-dimensional Chinese herbal medicines and the result shows that it outperforms other clustering algorithms in clustering Chinese herbal medicines, which can contribute to a larger effort targeted at advancing the study of discovering composition rules of traditional Chinese prescriptions.