Title
Visual Clustering with Artificial Ants Colonies
Abstract
In this paper, we propose a new model of the chemical recognition system of ants to solve the unsupervised clustering problem. The colonial closure mechanism allows ants to discriminate between nest-mates and intruders by the mean of a colonial odour that is shared by every nestmate. In our model we associate each object of the data set to the odour of an artificial ant. Each odour is defined as a real vector with two components, that can be represented in a 2D-space of odours. Our method simulates meetings between ants according to pre-established behavioural rules, to ensure the convergence of similar odours (i.e. similar objects) in the same portion of the 2D-space. This provides the expected partition of the objects. We test our method against other well-known clustering method and show that it can perform well. Furthermore, our approach can handle every type of data (from numerical to symbolic attibutes, since there exists an adapted similarity measure) and allows one to visualize the dynamic creation of the nests. We plan to use this algorithm as a basis for a more sophisticated interactive clustering tool.
Year
DOI
Venue
2003
10.1007/978-3-540-45224-9_47
LECTURE NOTES IN COMPUTER SCIENCE
Keywords
Field
DocType
ant colony
Convergence (routing),Fuzzy clustering,Similarity measure,Existential quantification,Recognition system,Computer science,Artificial intelligence,Cluster analysis,Artificial Ants
Conference
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
2773
0302-9743
8
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.66
3
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Nicolas Labroche113917.87
Nicolas Monmarché230532.73
Gilles Venturini366082.45