Differential evolution-based transfer rough clustering algorithm

Due to well processing the uncertainty in data, rough clustering methods have been successfully applied in many fields. However, when the capacity of the available data is limited or the data are disturbed by noise, the rough clustering algorithms always cannot effectively explore the structure of the data. Furthermore, rough clustering algorithms are usually sensitive to the initialized cluster centers and easy to fall into local optimum. To resolve the problems mentioned above, a novel differential evolution-based transfer rough clustering (DE-TRC) algorithm is proposed in this paper. First, transfer learning mechanism is introduced into rough clustering and a transfer rough clustering framework is designed, which utilizes the knowledge from the related domain to assist the clustering task. Then, the objective function of the transfer rough clustering algorithm is optimized by using the differential evolution algorithm to enhance the robustness of the algorithm. It can overcome the sensitivity to initialized cluster centers and meanwhile achieve the global optimal clustering. The proposed algorithm is validated on different synthetic and real-world datasets. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in comparison with both traditional rough clustering algorithms and other state-of-the-art clustering algorithms.