A Genetic Algorithm Approach for Clustering Large Data Sets

In this paper we present a sampling approach to run the k-means algorithm in large data sets. We propose a genetic algorithm to guide sampling based on evaluating the fitness of each individual of the population through the k-means clustering algorithm. Although we want a partition with the lowest SSE, our algorithm tries to find the sample with the highest SSE. After finding a good sample the remaining points of the entire data set are clustered using the nearest centroid and, after that, the SSE of the final solution is calculated. Our proposal is applied on a set of public domain data sets and the results are compared against two other methods: the k-means running in a uniform random sample of the data set; and the k-means in the complete data set. The results showed that our algorithm has a good trade off between quality and computational cost, especially for large data sets and higher number of clusters.