Differential Evolution (DE) has become an advanced, robust, and proficient alternative technique for clustering on account of their population-based stochastic and heuristic search manners. Balancing better the exploitation and exploration power of the DE algorithm is important because this ability influences the performance of the algorithm. Besides, keeping superior solutions for the initial population raises the probability of finding better solutions and the rate of convergence. In this paper, an enhanced DE algorithm is introduced for clustering to offer better cluster solutions with faster convergence. The proposed algorithm performs a modified mutation strategy to improve the DE’s search behavior and exploits Quasi-Opposition-based Learning (QBL) to choose fitter initial solutions. This mutation strategy that uses the best solution as a target solution and applies three differentials contributes to avoiding local optima trap and slow convergence. The QBL based initialization method also contributes to increasing the quality of the clustering results and convergence rate. The experimental analysis was conducted on seven real datasets from the UCI repository to evaluate the performance of the proposed clustering algorithm. The obtained results showed that the proposed algorithm achieves more compact clusters and stable solutions than the competing conventional DE variants. Moreover, the performance of the proposed algorithm was compared with the existing state of the art clustering techniques based on DE. The corresponding results also pointed out that the proposed algorithm is comparable to other DE based clustering approaches in terms of the value of the objective functions. Therefore, the proposed algorithm can be regarded as an efficient clustering tool.
Local Optima Networks, Landscape Autocorrelation and Heuristic Search Performance
