An analysis of ant colony clustering methods: Models, algorithms and applications

In recent years the ant colony clustering methods have emerged as a new kind of data mining schemes. The research of ant colony clustering methods is also an important direction for swarm intelligence. Today these methods have been deeply investigated and most of them show good performance. This paper will give an analysis of ant colony clustering methods from the perspective of models, algorithms and applications. First we introduce two important ant colony models: "foraging model"and "piling model", by which most ant colony clustering methods are inspired. Based on these two models, we present a survey on main ant colony clustering algorithms. Meanwhile, a classified summary of applications is given. We finally discuss our opinions on future research about ant colony clustering methods.