Dynamic local search based immune automatic clustering algorithm and its applications

Based on clonal selection mechanism in immune system, a dynamic local search based immune automatic clustering algorithm (DLSIAC) is proposed to automatically evolve the number of clusters as well as a proper partition of datasets. The real based antibody encoding consists of the activation thresholds and the clustering centers. Then based on the special structures of chromosomes, a particular dynamic local search scheme is proposed to exploit the neighborhood of each antibody as much as possible so to realize automatic variation of the antibody length during evolution. The dynamic local search scheme includes four basic operations, namely, the external cluster swapping, the internal cluster swapping, the cluster addition and the cluster decrease. Moreover, a neighborhood structure based clonal mutation is adopted to further improve the performance of the algorithm. The proposed algorithm has been extensively compared with five state-of-the-art automatic clustering techniques over a suit of datasets. Experimental results indicate that the DLSIAC is superior to other five clustering algorithms on the optimum number of clusters found and the clustering accuracy. In addition, DLSIAC is applied to a real problem, namely image segmentation, with a good performance. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.