A Dynamic Genetic Algorithm for Clustering Problems

Abstract

Due to many of the clustering algorithms based on GAs suffer from degeneracy and are easy to fall in local optima, a novel dynamic genetic algorithm for clustering problems (DGA) is proposed. The algorithm adopted the variable length coding to represent individuals and processed the parallel crossover operation in the subpopulation with individuals of the same length, which allows the DGA algorithm clustering to explore the search space more effectively and can automatically obtain the proper number of clusters and the proper partition from a given data set; the algorithm used the dynamic crossover probability and adaptive mutation probability, which prevented the dynamic clustering algorithm from getting stuck at a local optimal solution. The clustering results in the experiments on three artificial data sets and two real-life data sets show that the DGA algorithm derives better performance and higher accuracy on clustering problems.