Immunodominance and clonal selection inspired multiobjective clustering

The biological immune system is a highly parallel and distributed adaptive system. The information processing abilities of the immune system provide important insights into the field of computation. Based on immunodominance in the biological immune system and the clonal selection mechanism, a novel data mining method, Immune Dominance Clonal Multiobjective Clustering algorithm (IDCMC), is presented. The algorithm divides an individual population into three sub-populations according to three different measurements, and adopts different evolution and selection strategies for each sub-population. The update of each sub-population, however, is not carried out in isolation. The periodic combination operation of the analysis of the three sub-populations represents considerable advantages in its global search ability. The clustering task is a multiobjective optimization problem, which is more robust with respect to the variety of cluster structures of different datasets than a single-objective clustering algorithm. In addition, the new algorithm can determine the number of clusters automatically, which should identify the most promising clustering solutions in the candidate set. The experimental results, using artificial datasets with different manifold structure and handwritten digit datasets, show that the IDCMC outperforms the PESA-II-based clustering method, the genetic algorithm-based clustering technique and the original K-Means algorithm in solving most of the problems tested. (C) 2009 National Natural Science Foundation of China and Chinese Academy of Sciences. Published by Elsevier Limited and Science in China Press. All rights reserved.