Memetic Variable Clustering and Its Application

Clustering analysis is an important and difficult task in data mining and big data analysis. Although being a widely used clustering analysis technique, variable clustering did not get enough attention in previous studies. Inspired by the metaheuristic optimization techniques developed for clustering data items, we try to overcome the main shortcoming of k -means-based variable clustering algorithm, which is being sensitive to initial centroids by introducing the metaheuristic optimization. A novel memetic algorithm named MCLPSO (Memetic Comprehensive Learning Particle Swarm Optimization) based on CLPSO (Comprehensive Learning Particle Swarm Optimization) has been studied under the framework of memetic computing in our previous work. In this work, MCLPSO is used as a metaheuristic approach to improve the k -means-based variable clustering algorithm by adjusting the initial centroids iteratively to maximize the homogeneity of the clustering results. In MCLPSO, a chaotic local search operator is used and a simulated annealing- (SA-) based local search strategy is developed by combining the cognition-only PSO model with SA. The adaptive memetic strategy can enable the stagnant particles which cannot be improved by the comprehensive learning strategy to escape from the local optima and enable some elite particles to give fine-grained local search around the promising regions. The experimental result demonstrates a good performance of MCLPSO in optimizing the variable clustering criterion on several datasets compared with the original variable clustering method. Finally, for practical use, we also developed a web-based interactive software platform for the proposed approach and give a practical case study—analyzing the performance of semiconductor manufacturing system to demonstrate the usage.