A stochastic nature inspired metaheuristic for clustering analysis

This paper presents a new stochastic nature inspired methodology, which is based on the concepts of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), for optimally clustering N objects into K clusters. Due to the nature of stochastic and population-based search, the proposed algorithm can overcome the drawbacks of traditional clustering methods. Its performance is compared with other popular stochastic/metaheuristic methods like genetic algorithm and Tabu search. The proposed algorithm has been implemented and tested on several datasets with very good results.