SMCFO: a novel cuttlefish optimization algorithm enhanced by simplex method for data clustering

The proposed SMCFO algorithm consistently outperformed competing methods across all datasets, achieving higher clustering accuracy, faster convergence, and improved stability. The robustness of these outcomes was further confirmed through nonparametric statistical tests, which demonstrated that the performance improvements of SMCFO were statistically significant and not due to chance. The results confirm that the simplex-enhanced design boosts local exploitation and stabilizes convergence, which underlies SMCFO's superior performance compared to baseline methods.