Data clustering using <Emphasis Type="Italic">K</Emphasis>-Means based on Crow Search Algorithm

Cluster analysis is one of the popular data mining techniques and it is defined as the process of grouping similar data. K-Means is one of the clustering algorithms to cluster the numerical data. The features of K-Means clustering algorithm are easy to implement and it is efficient to handle large amounts of data. The major problem with K-Means is the selection of initial centroids. It selects the initial centroids randomly and it leads to a local optimum solution. Recently, nature-inspired optimization algorithms are combined with clustering algorithms to obtain the global optimum solution. Crow Search Algorithm (CSA) is a new population-based metaheuristic optimization algorithm. This algorithm is based on the intelligent behaviour of the crows. In this paper, CSA is combined with the K-Means clustering algorithm to obtain the global optimum solution. Experiments are conducted on benchmark datasets and the results are compared to those from various clustering algorithms and optimization-based clustering algorithms. Also the results are evaluated with internal, external and statistical experiments to prove the efficiency of the proposed algorithm.