• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.29 no.1_2
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• pp.80-90
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• 2002

Clustering is a useful technique for grouping data points such that points within a single group/cluster have similar characteristics. Many clustering algorithms have been developed and used in engineering applications including pattern recognition and image processing etc. Recently, it has drawn increasing attention as one of important techniques in data mining. However, clustering algorithms such as K-means and Fuzzy C-means suffer from difficulties. Those are the needs to determine the number of clusters apriori and the clustering results depending on the initial set of clusters which fails to gain desirable results. In this paper, we propose a new clustering algorithm, which solves mentioned problems. In our method we use evolutionary algorithm to solve the local optima problem that clustering converges to an undesirable state starting with an inappropriate set of clusters. We also adopt a new measure that represents how well data are clustered. The measure is determined in terms of both intra-cluster dispersion and inter-cluster separability. Using the measure, in our method the number of clusters is automatically determined as the result of optimization process. And also, we combine heuristic that is problem-specific knowledge with a evolutionary algorithm to speed evolutionary algorithm search. We have experimented our algorithm with several sets of multi-dimensional data and it has been shown that one algorithm outperforms the existing algorithms.