Section: New Results

Subspace Clustering Using Evolvable Genome Structure

We have developped an evolutionary algorithm to tackle the subspace clustering problem. Subspace clustering is recognized as more difficult than standard clustering since it requires to identify not only the clusters but also the various subspaces where the clusters hold. We propose to tackle this problem with a bio-inspired algorithm that includes many bio-like features like variable genome length and organization, functional and non-functional elements, and variation operators including chromosomal rearrangements. These features give the algorithm a large degree of freedom to achieve subspace clustering with satisfying results on a reference benchmark with respect to state of the art methods. One of the main advantages of the approach is that it needs only one subspace clustering ad-hoc parameter: the maximal number of clusters. This is a single and intuitive parameter that sets the maximal level of details of the clustering, while other algorithms require more complicated parameter space exploration. The other parameters of the algorithm are related to the evolution strategy (population size, mutation rate, ...) and for them we use a single setting that turns out to be effective on all the datasets of the benchmark.

This work has been presented at the main conference for genetic & evolutionary computation, GECCO [31] , where it received the best paper award and during the EvoEvo Workshop of ECAL 2015 [35] .