Computational and Mathematical Methods in Medicine
Volume 2015 (2015), Article ID 802754, 9 pages
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2015/802754

Research Article

An Efficient Optimization Method for Solving Unsupervised Data Classification Problems

Parvaneh Shabanzadeh1,2 and Rubiyah Yusof1,2

¹Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, 54100 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
²Malaysia-Japan International Institute of Technology (MJIIT), Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, 54100 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Received 13 March 2015; Revised 11 June 2015; Accepted 29 June 2015

Academic Editor: Andrzej Kloczkowski

Copyright © 2015 Parvaneh Shabanzadeh and Rubiyah Yusof. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract.

Unsupervised data classification (or clustering) analysis is one of the most useful tools and a descriptive task in data mining that seeks to classify homogeneous groups of objects based on similarity and is used in many medical disciplines and various applications. In general, there is no single algorithm that is suitable for all types of data, conditions, and applications. Each algorithm has its own advantages, limitations, and deficiencies. Hence, research for novel and effective approaches for unsupervised data classification is still active. In this paper a heuristic algorithm, Biogeography-Based Optimization (BBO) algorithm, was adapted for data clustering problems by modifying the main operators of BBO algorithm, which is inspired from the natural biogeography distribution of different species. Similar to other population-based algorithms, BBO algorithm starts with an initial population of candidate solutions to an optimization problem and an objective function that is calculated for them. To evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm assessment was carried on six medical and real life datasets and was compared with eight well known and recent unsupervised data classification algorithms. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed evolutionary optimization algorithm is efficient for unsupervised data classification.

1. Introduction

Unsupervised data classification (or data clustering) is one of the most important and popular data analysis techniques and refers to the process of grouping a set of data objects into clusters, in which the data of a cluster must have high degree of similarity and the data of different clusters must have high degree of dissimilarity [1]. The aim is to minimize the intercluster distance and maximize the intracluster distance. Clustering techniques have been applied in many areas such as document clustering [2, 3], medicine [4, 5], biology [6], agriculture [7], marketing and consumer analysis [8, 9], geophysics [10], prediction [11], image processing [12–14], security and crime detection [15], and anomaly detection [16].

In clustering problem, a dataset is divided into number of subgroups such that elements in one group are more similar to one another than elements of another group [17]. It can be defined to find out unknown patterns, knowledge, and information from a given dataset which was previously undiscovered using some criterion function [18]. It is NP complete problem when the number of cluster is greater than three [17]. Over the last two decades, many heuristic algorithms have been suggested and it is demonstrated that such algorithms are suitable for solving clustering problems in large datasets. For instance, the Tabu Search Algorithm for the clustering is presented in [19], the Simulated Annealing Algorithm in [20], the Genetic Algorithm in [21], and the particle swarm optimization algorithm in [22], which is one of powerful optimization methods. Fernández Martínez and Garcia-Gonzalo [23–26] clearly explained how PSO family parameters should be chosen close to the second order stability region. Hatamlou et al. in [27] introduced the Big Bang Big Crunch algorithm for the clustering problem. This algorithm has its origin from one of the theories of the evolution of the universe, namely, the Big Bang and Big Crunch theory. An Ant Colony Optimization was developed to solve the clustering problem in [28]. Such algorithms are able to find the global solution to the clustering. Application of the Gravitational Search Algorithm (GSA) [29] for clustering problem has been introduced in [30]. A comprehensive review on clustering algorithms can be found in [31–33].

In this paper, a new heuristic clustering algorithm is developed. It is based on the evolutionary method called the Biogeography-Based Optimization (BBO) method proposed in [34]. The BBO method is inspired from the science of biogeography; it is a population-based evolutionary algorithm. Convergence results for this method and its practical applications can be found in [35]. The algorithm has demonstrated good performance on various optimization benchmark problems [36]. The proposed clustering algorithm is tested on six datasets from UCI Machine Learning Repository [37] and the obtained results are compared with those obtained using other similar algorithms.

The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes clustering problem. A brief overview of the BBO algorithm is given in Section 3. Section 4 presents the clustering algorithm. Experimental results are reported in Section 5. Finally, Section 6 presents conclusions with future research direction.

2. Cluster Analysis

In cluster analysis we suppose that we have been given a set of a finite number of points of -dimensional space , that is , where

In all, clustering algorithms can be classified into two categories, namely, hierarchical clustering and partitional clustering. Partitional clustering methods are the most popular class of center based clustering methods. It has been seen that partitional algorithm is more commendable rather than hierarchical clustering. The advantage of partitional algorithm is its visibility in circumstances where application involving large dataset is used where construction of nested grouping of patterns is computationally prohibited [38, 39]. The clustering problem is said to be hard clustering if every data point belongs to only one cluster. Unlike hard clustering, in the fuzzy clustering problem the clusters are allowed to overlap and instances have degrees of appearance in each cluster [40]. In this paper we will exclusively consider the hard unconstrained clustering problem. Therefore, the subject of cluster analysis is the partition of the set into a given number or disjoint subsets , with respect to predefined criteria such that

Each cluster can be identified by its center (or centroid). To determine the dissimilarity between objects, many distance metrics have been defined. The most popular distance metric is the Euclidean distance. In this research we will also use Euclidean metric as a distance metric to measure the dissimilarity between data objects. So, for given two objects and with -dimensions, the distance is defined by [38] as

Since there are different ways to cluster a given set of objects, a fitness function (cost function) for measuring the goodness of clustering should be defined. A famous and widely used function for this purpose is the total mean-square quantization error (MSE) [41], which is defined as follows:

where is the distance between object and the center of cluster to be found by calculating the mean value of objects within the respective cluster.

3. Biogeography-Based Optimization Algorithm

In this section, we give a brief description of the Biogeography-Based Optimization (BBO) algorithm. BBO is a new evolutionary optimization method based on the study of geographic distribution of biological organisms (biogeography) [34]. Organisms in BBO are called species, and their distribution is considered over time and space. Species can migrate between islands which are called habitat. Habitat is characterized by a Habitat Suitability Index (HSI). HSI in BBO is similar to the fitness in other population-based optimization algorithms and measures the solution goodness. HSI is related to many features of the habitat [34]. Considering a global optimization problem and a population of candidate solutions (individuals), each individual can be considered as a habitat and is characterized by its HSI. A habitat with high HSI is a good solution (maximization problem). Similar to other evolutionary algorithms, good solutions share their features with others to produce a better population in the next generations. Conversely, an individual with low fitness is unlikely to share features and likely accept features. Suitability index variable (SIV) implies the habitability of a habitat. As there are many factors in the real world which make a habitat more suitable to reside than others, there are several SIVs for a solution which affect its goodness. A SIV is a feature of the solution and can be imagined like a gene in GA. BBO consists of two main steps: migration and mutation. Migration is a probabilistic operator that is intended to improve a candidate solution [42, 43]. In BBO, the migration operator includes two different types: immigration and emigration, where for each solution in each generation, the rates of these types are adaptively determined based on the fitness of the solution. In BBO, each candidate solution has its own immigration rate and emigration rate as follows:

where is the population size and shows the rank of th individual in a ranked list which has been sorted based on the fitness of the population from the worst fitness to the best one ( is worst and is best). Also and are the maximum possible emigration and immigration rates, which are typically set to one. A good candidate solution has latively high emigration rate and allows immigration rate, while the converse is true for a poor candidate solution. Therefore if a given solution is selected to be modified (in migration step), then its immigration rate is applied to probabilistically modify each SIV in that solution. The emigrating candidate solution is probabilistically chosen based on . Different methods have been suggested for sharing information between habitats (candidate solutions), in [44], where migration is defined by

where is a number between 0 and 1. It could be random or deterministic or it could be proportional to the relative fitness of the solutions and . Equation (5) means that (feature solution) SIV of comes from a combination of its own SIV and the emigrating solution’s SIV. Mutation is a probabilistic operator that randomly modifies a decision variable of a candidate solution. The purpose of mutation is to increase diversity among the population. The mutation rate is calculated in [34]

where is the solution probability and  , where is the population size and is user-defined parameter.

If is selected for mutation, then the candidate solution is probabilistically chosen based on ; thus replace with a randomly generated SIV. Several options can be used for mutation but one option for implementing that can be defined as

where

is user-defined parameter near 0 and also are the upper and lower bounds for each decision variable and is random number, normally distributed in the range of (0, 1).

Based on the above description, the main steps of the BBO algorithm can be described as follows.

Step 1 (initialization). At first, introduce the initial parameters that include the number of generations, necessary for the termination criterion, population size, which indicates the number of habitats/islands/solutions, number of design variables, maximum immigration and emigration rates, and mutation coefficient and also create a random set of habitats (population).

Step 2 (evaluation). Compute corresponding HSI values and rank them on the basis of fitness.

Step 3 (update parameters). Update the immigration rate and emigration rate for each island/solution. Bad solutions have low emigration rates and high immigration rates whereas good solutions have high emigration rates and low immigration rates.

Step 4 (select islands). Probabilistically select the immigration islands based on the immigration rates and select the emigrating islands based on the emigration rates via roulette wheel selection.

Step 5 (migration phase). Randomly change the selected features (SIVs), based on (4)–(5) and based on the selected islands in the previous step.

Step 6 (mutation phase). Probabilistically carry out mutation based on the mutation probability for each solution, that is, based on (6).

Step 7 (check the termination criteria). If the output of the termination criterion step is not met, go to Step 2; otherwise, terminate it.

4. BBO Algorithm for Data Clustering

In order to use BBO algorithm for data clustering, one-dimensional arrays are used to encode the centres of the desired clusters to present candidate solutions in the proposed algorithm. The length of the arrays is equal to , where is the number of clusters and is the dimensionality of the considered datasets. Figure 1 presents an example of candidate solution for a problem with centroids clusters and attributes.

Figure 1: The encoding of an example of candidate solution.

Then assume is the th candidate solution and is the th cluster centre for the th candidate solution ( and , so that is the number of islands or candidate solutions in which its value in this work is set to 100. Therefore each of these candidate solutions shows centers of all clusters.

A good initial population is important to the performance of BBO and most of the population-based methods are affected by the quality of the initial population. Then in the proposed algorithm, taking into considering the nature of the input datasets, a high-quality population is created based on special ways as mentioned in pseudocodes. One of the candidate solutions will be produced by dividing whole dataset to equal sets, and three of them will be produced based on minimum, maximum, and average values of data objects in each dataset and other solutions will be created randomly. This procedure creates a high-quality initial population and consequently this procedure ensures that the candidate solutions are spread in the wide area of the search space, which as a result increases the chance of finding (near) global optima.

To ensure that the best habitats/solutions are preserved, elitist method is used to save the best individual found so far into the new population. So elitism strategy is proposed in order to retain the best solutions in the population from one generation to the next. Therefore in the proposed algorithm, new population is created based on merging initial population (old population) and the population due to migration and mutation process (new population). Then suppose is the entire initial population of candidate solutions and is the initial population, changed by iteration of BBO, and is percentage of initial population that is chosen in next iteration (whose value in this work is 30%). So the number of kept habitats of old population ( is as follows:

And the number of kept habitats of new population is as follows:

Hence the population of next iteration can be as follows:

Suppose is the th candidate solution and is the th decision variable of . Based on the above description, the pseudocode of the proposed method is shown in Algorithm 1.

Create an initial population POP, as follow:

    (i) ,  

    Where Min(dataset) and Max(dataset) are correspond with data items that their features are

    the minimum and maximum values in whole of the dataset respectively.

    (ii) = Create a candidate solution using the minimum of the dataset

    (iii) = Create a candidate solution using the maximum of the dataset

    (iv) = Create a candidate solution using the mean of the dataset

    (v) : Create all other candidate solutions randomly as follow:

        for pop

            for

                for

                     = random number in range of

                    Where LC() and UC() are the lower and upper bounds for each decision

                    variable (i.e. LC() < < UC(), ).

                end for

            end for

        end for

Calculate fitness of POP (cost function) according to (3) and sort it from the Best

(minimum) fitness to the worst one (maximum).

for to , (for each solution )

    Compute emigration rate proportional to fitness of , where , so that ,

     and immigration rate , so that , .

end for

    Set , , , based on (8)–(11)

While termination conditions are not met

                                                            NewPOP ← POP

 for to pop (for each solution )

        for to (for each candidate solution decision variable index )

            Choose whether to immigrate with probabilistically decide .

            if New is selected for immigrating

                    Use values to probabilistically select the emigrating solution .

                    if is selected for emigrating

                            , based on (5) by setting

                             = random number in range of (0.9, 1).

                    end if

            end if

With probabilistically decide whether to mutate based on (6).

if is selected for mutation, thus based on (7), (8):

    for

        if

                              , where its value in this work

                             is 0.02, also are the lower and upper bounds for each decision variable

                        Break

        end if

    end for

end if

        end for (repeat for next candidate solution decision variable index)

        Recalculate fitness of .

    End for (repeat for next solution)

    Sort population based on fitness function.

    Make new population POP, based on combinatorial of old POP and New POP based on (7).

    Sort new population based on fitness function.

    Update and store, best solution ever found.

end while

Algorithm 1: Pseudocodes of proposed method.

5. Experimental Results

The proposed method is implemented using MATLAB 7.6 on a T6400, 2 GHz, 2 GB RAM computer. To evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm, the results obtained have been compared with other algorithms by applying them on some well known datasets taken from Machine Learning Laboratory [37]. Six datasets are employed to validate the proposed method. These datasets named Cancer, CMC, Iris, Glass, Wine, and Vowel cover examples of data of low, medium, and high dimensions. The brief of the characteristics of these datasets is presented in Table 1. They have been applied by many authors to study and evaluate the performance of their algorithms, and they can be described as follows.

Table 1: Summarized characteristics of the test datasets.

Name of dataset
Number of data objects
Number of features
Number of clusters

Cancer
683
9
2 (444, 239)

CMC
1473
9
3 (629, 334, 510)

Glass
214
9
6 (70, 76, 17, 13, 9, 29)

Iris
150
4
3 (50, 50, 50)

Vowel
871
3
6 (72, 89, 172, 151, 207, 180)

Wine
178
13
3 (59, 71, 48)

Wisconsin Breast Cancer Dataset . This dataset has 683 points with nine features such as cell size uniformity, clump thickness cell, bare nuclei, shape uniformity, marginal adhesion, single epithelial cell size, bland chromatin, normal nucleoli, and mitoses. There are two clusters in this dataset: malignant and benign.

Contraceptive Method Choice Dataset . This dataset is a subset of the 1987 National Indonesia Contraceptive Prevalence Survey. The samples are married women who either were not pregnant or did not know if they were at the time of interview. The problem is to predict the choice of current contraceptive method (no use has 629 objects, long-term methods have 334 objects, and short-term methods have 510 objects) of a woman based on her demographic and socioeconomic characteristics.

Ripley’s Glass Dataset . This dataset has 214 points with nine features. The dataset has six different clusters which are building windows float processed, building windows nonfloat processed, vehicle windows float processed, containers, tableware, and headlamps [41].

Iris Dataset . This data consists of three different species of iris flower: Iris setosa, Iris virginica, and Iris versicolour. For each species, 50 samples with four features each (sepal length, sepal width, petal length, and petal width) were collected [45].

Vowel Dataset . It consists of 871 Indian Telugu vowel sounds. The dataset has three features corresponding to the first, second, and third vowel frequencies and six overlapping classes [45].

Wine Dataset . This dataset describes the quality of wine from physicochemical properties in Italy. There are 178 instances with 13 continues attributes grouped into 3 classes. There is no missing value for attributes.

In this paper the performance of the proposed algorithm is compared with recent algorithms reported in the literature, including -means [38], TS [19], SA [20], PSO [22, 39], BB-BC [27], GA [21], GSA [30], and ACO [46].

In this paper two criteria are used to measure the quality of solutions found by clustering algorithms:

(i)Sum of intracluster distances: The distance between each data vector in a cluster and the centroid of that cluster is calculated and summed up, as defined in (3). It is also the evaluation fitness in this paper. Clearly, the smaller the value is, the higher the quality of the clustering is.(ii)Error rate (ER): It is defined as the number of misplaced points over the total number of points in the dataset as

where is the total number of data points and and denote the datasets of which the th point is a member before and after clustering, respectively.

Since all the algorithms are stochastic algorithms, therefore for each experiment 10 independent runs are carried out to indicate the stability and robustness of the algorithms for against with the randomized nature of the algorithms. The average, best (minimum), and worst (maximum) solutions and standard deviation of solutions of 10 runs of each algorithm are obtained by using algorithms on the datasets, which have been applied for comparison. This process ensures that the candidate solutions are spread in the wide area of the search space and thus increases the chance of finding optima.

Table 2 presents the intracluster distances obtained from the eight clustering algorithms for the datasets above. For the cancer dataset, the average, best, and worst solutions of BBO algorithm are 2964.3879, 2964.3875, and 2964.3887, respectively, which are much better than those of other algorithms except BB-BC which is the same as it. This means that it provides the optimum value and small standard deviation, when compared to those obtained by the other methods. For the CMC dataset, the proposed method reaches an average of 5532.2550, while other algorithms were unable to reach this solution. Also, the results obtained on the glass dataset show that BBO method converges to the optimum of 215.2097 in all of runs while the average solutions of the -means, TS, SA, GA, PSO, BB-BC, GSA, and ACO, are 227.9779, 283.79, 282.19, 230.49328, 231.2306, 255.38, 233.5433, and 273.46, respectively. For the iris dataset, the average of solutions found by BBO is 96.5653, while this value for the -means, TS, SA, GA, PSO, BB-BC, GSA, and ACO, is 105.7290, 97.8680, 99.95, 98.1423, 96.7654, 125.1970, 96.7311, and 97.1715, respectively. As seen from the results for the vowel dataset, the BBO algorithm outperformed the -means, TS, SA, GA, PSO, BB-BC, GSA, and ACO algorithms, with the average solution 149072.9042. For the Wine dataset, the BBO algorithm achieved the optimum value of 16292.6782, which is significantly better than the other tested algorithms.

Table 2: Intracluster distances for real life datasets.

Dataset
Criteria
-means
TS
SA
PSO
BB-BC
GA
GSA
ACO
BBO

Cancer
Average
3032.2478
3251.37
3239.17
2981.7865
2964.3880
3249.46
2972.6631
3,046.06
2964.3879

Best
2986.9613
2982.84
2993.45
2974.4809
2964.3875
2999.32
2965.7639
2,970.49
2964.3875

Worst
5216.0895
3434.16
3421.95
3053.4913
2964.3890
3427.43
2993.2446
3,242.01
2964.3887

Std.
315.1456
232.217
230.192
10.43651
0.00048
229.734
8.91860
90.50028
0.00036

CMC
Average
5543.4234
5993.59
5893.48
5547.8932
5574.7517
5756.59
5581.9450
5,819.1347
5532.2550

Best
5542.1821
5885.06
5849.03
5539.1745
5534.0948
5705.63
5542.2763
5,701.9230
5532.2113

Worst
5545.3333
5999.80
5966.94
5561.6549
5644.7026
5812.64
5658.7629
5,912.4300
5532.432

Std.
1.5238
40.845
50.867
7.35617
39.4349
50.369
41.13648
45.634700
0.06480

Glass
Average
227.9779
283.79
282.19
230.49328
231.2306
255.38
233.5433
273.46
215.2097

Best
215.6775
279.87
275.16
223.90546
223.8941
235.50
224.9841
269.72
210.6173

Worst
260.8385
286.47
287.18
246.08915
243.2088
278.37
248.3672
280.08
233.9314

Std.
14.1389
4.19
4.238
4.79320
4.6501
12.47
6.13946
3.5848
3.525

Iris
Average
105.7290
97.8680
99.95
98.1423
96.7654
125.1970
96.7311
97.1715
96.5653

Best
97.3259
97.3659
97.45
96.8793
96.6765
113.9865
96.6879
97.1007
96.5403

Worst
128.4042
98.56949
102.01
99.7695
97.4287
139.7782
96.8246
97.8084
96.6609

Std.
12.3876
72.86
2.018
0.84207
0.20456
14.563
0.02761
0.367
0.0394

Vowel
Average
153,660.8071
162108.53
161566.28
153,218.23418
151,010.0339
159153.49
152,931.8104
159,458.1438
149072.9042

Best
149,394.8040
149468.26
149370.47
152,461.56473
149,038.5168
149513.73
151,317.5639
149,395.602
148967.2544

Worst
168,474.2659
165996.42
165986.42
158,987.08231
153,090.4407
165991.65
155,346.6952
165,939.8260
153051.96931

Std.
4123.04203
2846.235
0.645
2945.23167
1859.3235
3105.544
2486.70285
3,485.3816
137.7311

Wine
Average
16,963.0441
16785.46
17,521.09
16,316.2745
16,303.4121
16,530.53
16,374.3091
16,530.53381
16292.6782

Best
16,555.6794
16666.22
16,473.48
16,304.4858
16,298.6736
16,530.53
16,313.8762
16,530.53381
16292.6782

Worst
23,755.0495
16837.54
18,083.25
16,342.7811
16,310.1135
16,530.53
16,428.8649
16,530.53381
16292.6782

Std.
1180.6942
52.073
753.084
12.60275
2.6620
0
34.67122
0
0

From Table 2, we can see that the BBO algorithm has achieved the good performance in terms of the average, best, and worst intercluster distances on these six datasets. It means that BBO can find good quality solutions.

The best centroids coordinates obtained by the BBO algorithm on the test dataset are shown in Tables 3–8. Finally, Table 9 shows the error rate values obtained by algorithms for real datasets. As seen from the results in Table 9, the BBO algorithm presents a minimum average error rate in all the real datasets. However, the topography of the cost function of clustering (3) has a valley shape; therefore the found solutions by these methods were not global. Therefore the experimental results in the tables demonstrate that the proposed method is one of practicable and good techniques for data clustering.

Table 3: The obtained best centroids coordinate for Cancer data.

Cancer data
Cluster 1
Cluster 2

Feature A
7.1156
2.8896

Feature B
6.6398
1.1278

Feature C
6.6238
1.2018

Feature D
5.6135
1.1646

Feature E
5.2402
1.9943

Feature F
8.0995
1.1215

Feature G
6.0789
2.0059

Feature H
6.0198
1.1014

Feature I
2.3282
1.0320

Table 4: The obtained best centroids coordinate for CMC data.

CMC data
Cluster 1
Cluster 2
Cluster 3

Feature A
43.6354
33.4957
24.4102

Feature B
3.0140
3.1307
3.0417

Feature C
3.4513
3.5542
3.5181

Feature D
4.582
3.6511
1.7947

Feature E
0.7965
0.7928
0.9275

Feature F
0.7629
0.6918
0.7928

Feature G
1.8245
2.0903
2.2980

Feature H
3.4355
3.29183
2.9754

Feature I
0.094
0.0573
0.037

Table 5: The obtained best centroids coordinate for Glass data.

Glass data
Cluster 1
Cluster 2
Cluster 3
Cluster 4
Cluster 5
Cluster 6

Feature A
1.5260
1.5156
1.5228
1.5266
1.5203
1.5243

Feature B
11.9759
13.0863
14.6577
13.2229
13.7277
13.8085

Feature C
0.006
3.5272
0.0061
0.4232
3.5127
2.3414

Feature D
1.0514
1.3618
2.2170
1.5242
1.0249
2.5919

Feature E
72.0540
72.8710
73.2504
73.0610
71.9072
71.1423

Feature F
0.2552
0.5768
0.0299
0.3865
0.2067
2.5749

Feature G
14.3566
8.3588
8.6714
11.1471
9.4166
5.9948

Feature H
0.1808
0.0046
1.047
0.00979
0.0281
1.3373

Feature I
0.1254
0.0568
0.0196
0.1544
0.0498
0.2846

Table 6: The obtained best centroids coordinate for Iris data.

Iris data
Cluster 1
Cluster 2
Cluster 3

Feature A
5.0150
5.9338
6.7343

Feature B
3.4185
2.7974
3.0681

Feature C
1.4681
4.4173
5.6299

Feature D
0.2380
1.4165
2.1072

Table 7: The obtained best centroids coordinate for Vowel data.

Vowel data
Cluster 1
Cluster 2
Cluster 3
Cluster 4
Cluster 5
Cluster 6

Feature A
357.8349
375.8459
508.1135
407.9219
623.6778
439.6126

Feature B
2,291.6435
2,148.4110
1,838.2133
1,0182.0145
1,309.8038
987.4300

Feature C
2,978.2399
2,678.8524
2,555.9085
2,317.2847
2,332.7767
2,665.4154

Table 8: The obtained best centroids coordinates for Wine data.

Wine data
Cluster 1
Cluster 2
Cluster 3

Feature A
13.3856
12.7859
12.7093

Feature B
1.9976
2.3535
2.3219

Feature C
2.3150
2.4954
2.4497

Feature D
16.9836
19.5480
21.1983

Feature E
105.2124
98.9327
92.6449

Feature F
3.0255
2.0964
2.1366

Feature G
3.1380
1.4428
1.9187

Feature H
0.51050
0.31322
0.3520

Feature I
2.3769
1.7629
1.4966

Feature J
5.7760
5.8415
4.3213

Feature K
0.8339
1.1220
1.2229

Feature L
3.0686
1.9611
2.5417

Feature M
1137.4923
687.3041
463.8856

Table 9: Error rates for real life datasets.

Dataset
-means
PSO
GSA
BBO

Cancer
4.08
5.11
3.74
3.7

CMC
54.49
54.41
55.67
54.22

Glass
37.71
45.59
41.39
36.47

Iris
17.80
12.53
10.04
10.03

Vowel
44.26
44.65
42.26
41.36

Wine
31.12
28.71
29.15
28.65

6. Conclusions

In summary, this paper presents a new clustering algorithm based on the recently developed BBO heuristic algorithm that is inspired by mathematical models of science of biogeography (study of the distribution of animals and plants over time and space).

To evaluate the performance of the BBO algorithm, it was tested on six real life datasets and compared with other eight clustering algorithms. The experimental results indicate that the BBO optimization algorithm is suitable and useful heuristic technique for data clustering. In order to improve the obtained results, as a future work, we plan to hybridize the proposed approach with other algorithms and we intend to apply this method with other data mining problems.

Conflict of Interests

The authors declare that there is no conflict of interests regarding the publication of this paper.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the Ministry of Education Malaysia for funding this research project through a Research University Grant of Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM), project titled “Based Syariah Compliance Chicken Slaughtering Process for Online Monitoring and Enforcement” (01G55). Also, thanks are due to the Research Management Center (RMC) of UTM for providing an excellent research environment in which to complete this work.

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