An adaptive and opposite -means operation based memetic algorithm for data clustering.

Evolutionary algorithm (EA) incorporating with k-means local search operator represents an important approach for cluster analysis. In the existing EA approach, however, the k-means operators are usually directly employed on the individuals and generally applied with fixed intensity as well as frequency during evolution, which could significantly limit their performance. In this paper, we first introduce a hybrid EA based clustering framework such that the frequency and intensity of k-means operator could be arbitrarily configured during evolution. Then, an adaptive strategy is devised to dynamically set its frequency and intensity according to the feedback of evolution. Further, we develop an opposite search strategy to implement the proposed adaptive k-means operation, thus appropriately exploring the search space. By incorporating the above two strategies, a memetic algorithm with adaptive and opposite k-means operation is finally proposed for data clustering. The performance of the proposed method has been evaluated on a series of data sets and compared with relevant algorithms. Experimental results indicate that our proposed algorithm is generally able to deliver superior performance and outperform related methods.