An improved artificial bee colony algorithm based on whale optimization algorithm for data clustering

Data clustering is one of the branches of unsupervised learning and it is a process whereby the samples are divided into categories whose members are similar to each other. The K-means algorithm is a simple and fast clustering technique, but it has many initial problems, for example, it depends heavily on the initial value for better clustering. Moreover, it is susceptible to outliers and unbalanced clusters. The artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm is one of the meta-heuristic algorithms that is used nowadays to solve many optimization problems including clustering and the fundamental problem of this algorithm is exploration and late convergence. In this paper, to solve the problem of exploration and late convergence in ABC are used Random Memory (RM) and Elite Memory (EM) called ABCWOA algorithm. RM in the ABCWOA algorithm has used the search stage for the bait in the whale optimization algorithm (WOA) and EM is also used to increase convergence. In addition, we control the use of EM dynamically. Finally, the proposed method was implemented on ten standard datasets from the UCI Machine Learning Database for evaluation. Moreover, it was compared in terms of statistical criteria and analysis of variance (ANOVA) test with basic ABC and WOA, vortex search (VS) algorithm, butterfly optimization algorithm (BOA), crow search (CS) algorithm, and cuckoo search algorithm (CSA). The simulation results showed that the degree of convergence maintained its performance by increasing the number of repetitions of the proposed method, but the ABC algorithm has shown poor performance by increasing the repetition of performance. ANOVA results also confirmed that the ABCWOA algorithm has a positive effect on the population and it contains less noise than other comparative algorithms. The ABCWOA algorithm show that the ABCWOA algorithm performs better than other meta-heuristic algorithms.