SURVEY ON TRADITIONAL AND EVOLUTIONARY CLUSTERING APPROACHES

Christabel Williams, Bright Gee Varghese R

Abstract: Clustering deals with grouping up of similar objects. Unlike classification, clustering tries to group a set of objects and find whether there is some relationship between the objects whereas in classification a set of predefined classes will be known and it is enough to find which class a object belongs. Simply, classification is a supervised learning technique and clustering is an unsupervised learning technique. Clustering techniques apply when there is no class to be predicted but rather when the instances are to be divided into natural groups. These clusters presumably reflect some mechanism at work in the domain from which instances are drawn, a mechanism that causes some instances to bear a stronger resemblance to each other than they do to the remaining instances. It naturally requires different techniques to the classification and association learning methods .Clustering has many applications in various fields. In Software engineering it helps in reverse engineering, software maintenance and for re-building systems. It aims at breaking a larger problem into small pieces of understanding elements. There are many approaches available to carry out clustering. Since clustering has no particular methodology there are many methods available for carrying out clustering. There are many traditional as well as evolutionary methods available for carrying out clustering. In this paper various types of the above mentioned methods are described and some of them are compared. Each method has its own advantage and they can be used according to the needs of the user.

Keywords: Clustering, Classification, Software Engineering, Traditional, Evolutionary.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15623/ijret.2013.0212074