Metaheuristics for data mining: survey and opportunities for big data

In the context of big data, many scientific communities aim to provide efficient approaches to accommodate large-scale datasets. This is the case of the machine-learning community, and more generally, the artificial intelligence community. The aim of this article is to explain how data mining problems can be considered as combinatorial optimization problems, and how metaheuristics can be used to address them. Four primary data mining tasks are presented: clustering, association rules, classification, and feature selection. This article follows the publication of a book in 2016 concerning this subject (Dhaenens and Jourdan in Metaheuristics for big data, Wiley, Hoboken, 2016), and an article published in 4OR (Dhaenens and Jourdan in 4OR 17 (2):115–139, 2019); additionally, updated references and an analysis of the current trends are presented.