An Evolutionary Algorithm with Crossover and Mutation for Model-Based Clustering
This is an incremental improvement for researchers in clustering algorithms, offering a new method for hard model-based clustering.
The authors tackled parameter estimation in model-based clustering by developing an evolutionary algorithm as an alternative to the EM algorithm, resulting in an efficient approach for hard clustering that generalizes k-means and was compared to other methods on several datasets.
An evolutionary algorithm (EA) is developed as an alternative to the EM algorithm for parameter estimation in model-based clustering. This EA facilitates a different search of the fitness landscape, i.e., the likelihood surface, utilizing both crossover and mutation. Furthermore, this EA represents an efficient approach to "hard" model-based clustering and so it can be viewed as a sort of generalization of the k-means algorithm, which is itself equivalent to a restricted Gaussian mixture model. The EA is illustrated on several datasets, and its performance is compared to other hard clustering approaches and model-based clustering via the EM algorithm.