An Improved Ant Colony Clustering Algorithm and Application in Classification of Tree Species

Abstract Clustering is one of the most challenging research topics and has attracted the attention of many researchers. Clustering aims to divide a given set of objects into several categories according to certain rules. It is widely applied to practical problems, such as knowledge discovery, artificial intelligence, scientific data analysis, business, biology, medical diagnosis, text mining, and web data mining and so on. Ant colony clustering algorithm (ACCA), which integrates ACA into clustering, is an efficient swarm intelligence algorithm. There are some weakness in the basic ant colony clustering algorithm, such as low solving efficiency, poor calculation accuracy and iteration stagnation. In this article, an improved Ant Colony Clustering Algorithm (IACCA), in which novel picking-up and dropping strategy is introduced, is proposed and applied to classification of tree species. The experiments indicate efficiency of IACCA for classification of tree species.