Multi-objective memetic differential evolution optimization algorithm for text clustering problems

Most text clustering algorithms adopt a single criterion optimization approach, which often fails to find good clustering solutions for a wide diversity of datasets with different clustering characteristics. The multi-objective meta-heuristic approach is utilized to seek optimal clustering by maximizing (or minimizing) more than two objective functions. In this paper, we propose a multi-objective memetic differential evolution algorithm (MOMDE) for text clustering. The MOMDE text clustering algorithm combines memetic and differential evolution algorithms to improve the search for optimal clustering by improving the balance between exploitation and exploration. Moreover, a combination with the dominance-based multi-objective approach is employed, which may improve the search for optimal clustering by maximizing or/and minimizing two cluster quality measures. The proposed algorithm is tested on six text clustering datasets from the Laboratory of Computational Intelligence. Our experimental results revealed that the performance of the MOMDE algorithm is better than state-of-the-art text clustering algorithms. Further validation is provided using the F-measure to assess the efficiency of the obtained clustering of MOMDE, whilst the multi-objective performance assessment matrices are used to evaluate the quality of Pareto-optimality.