Multi-objective Clustering Algorithm with Parallel Games

Data mining and knowledge discovery are two important growing research fields in the last few decades due to the abundance of data collected from various sources. The exponentially growing volumes of generated data urge the development of several mining techniques to feed the needs for automatically derived knowledge. Clustering analysis (finding similar groups of data) is a well-established and widely used approach in data mining and knowledge discovery. In this paper, we introduce a clustering technique that uses game theory models to tackle multi-objective application problems. The main idea is to exploit a specific type of simultaneous move games, called congestion games. Congestion games offer numerous advantages ranging from being succinctly represented to possessing a Nash equilibrium that is reachable in a polynomial-time. The proposed algorithm has three main steps: 1) it starts by identifying the initial players (or the cluster-heads); 2) then, it establishes the initial clusters' composition by constructing the game to play and try to find the equilibrium of the game. The third step consists of merging close clusters to obtain the final clusters. The experiment results show that the proposed clustering approach obtains good results and it is very promising in terms of scalability, and performance.