A new hybrid imperialist competitive algorithm on data clustering

Clustering is a process for partitioning datasets. This technique is very useful for optimum solution. k-means is one of the simplest and the most famous methods that is based on square error criterion. This algorithm depends on initial states and converges to local optima. Some recent researches show that k-means algorithm has been successfully applied to combinatorial optimization problems for clustering. In this paper, we purpose a novel algorithm that is based on combining two algorithms of clustering; k-means and Modify Imperialist Competitive Algorithm. It is named hybrid K-MICA. In addition, we use a method called modified expectation maximization (EM) to determine number of clusters. The experimented results show that the new method carries out better results than the ACO, PSO, Simulated Annealing (SA), Genetic Algorithm (GA), Tabu Search (TS), Honey Bee Mating Optimization (HBMO) and k-means.