CLUSTERING USING SIMULATED ANNEALING WITH PROBABILISTIC REDISTRIBUTION

Abstract

An efficient partitional clustering technique, called SAKM-clustering, that integrates the power of simulated annealing for obtaining minimum energy configuration, and the searching capability of K-means algorithm is proposed in this article. The clustering methodology is used to search for appropriate clusters in multidimensional feature space such that a similarity metric of the resulting clusters is optimized. Data points are redistributed among the clusters probabilistically, so that points that are farther away from the cluster center have higher probabilities of migrating to other clusters than those which are closer to it. The superiority of the SAKM-clustering algorithm over the widely used K-means algorithm is extensively demonstrated for artificial and real life data sets.