Evolutionary subspace clustering using variable genome length

Subspace clustering is a data-mining task that groups similar data objects and at the same time searches the subspaces where similarities appear. For this reason, subspace clustering is recognized as more general and complicated than standard clustering. In this article, we present ChameleoClust+, a bioinspired evolutionary subspace clustering algorithm that takes advantage of an evolvable genome structure to detect various numbers of clusters located in different subspaces. ChameleoClust+ incorporates several biolike features such as a variable genome length, both functional and nonfunctional elements, and mutation operators including large rearrangements. It was assessed and compared with the state-of-the-art methods on a reference benchmark using both real-world and synthetic data sets. Although other algorithms may need complex parameter settings, ChameleoClust+ needs to set only one subspace clustering ad hoc and intuitive parameter: the maximal number of clusters. The remaining parameters of ChameleoClust+ are related to the evolution strategy (eg, population size, mutation rate), and a single setting for all of them turned out to be effective for all the benchmark data sets. A sensitivity analysis has also been carried out to study the impact of each parameter on the subspace clustering quality.