Dynamic clustering with improved binary artificial bee colony algorithm

One of the most well-known binary (discrete) versions of the artificial bee colony algorithm is the similarity measure based discrete artificial bee colony, which was first proposed to deal with the uncapacited facility location (UFLP) problem. The discrete artificial bee colony simply depends on measuring the similarity between the binary vectors through Jaccard coefficient. Although it is accepted as one of the simple, novel and efficient binary variant of the artificial bee colony, the applied mechanism for generating new solutions concerning to the information of similarity between the solutions only consider one similarity case i.e. it does not handle all similarity cases. To cover this issue, new solution generation mechanism of the discrete artificial bee colony is enhanced using all similarity cases through the genetically inspired components. Furthermore, the superiority of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated by comparing it with the basic discrete artificial bee colony, binary particle swarm optimization, genetic algorithm in dynamic (automatic) clustering, in which the number of clusters is determined automatically i.e. it does not need to be specified in contrast to the classical techniques. Not only evolutionary computation based algorithms, but also classical approaches such as fuzzy C-means and K-means are employed to put forward the effectiveness of the proposed approach in clustering. The obtained results indicate that the discrete artificial bee colony with the enhanced solution generator component is able to reach more valuable solutions than the other algorithms in dynamic clustering, which is strongly accepted as one of the most difficult NP-hard problem by researchers. © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.