A flocking based algorithm for document clustering analysis

ct 7 Social animals or insects in nature often exhibit a form of emergent collective behavior known as flocking. In this paper, 8 we present a novel Flocking based approach for document clustering analysis. Our Flocking clustering algorithm uses sto9 chastic and heuristic principles discovered from observing bird flocks or fish schools. Unlike other partition clustering algo10 rithm such as K-means, the Flocking based algorithm does not require initial partitional seeds. The algorithm generates a 11 clustering of a given set of data through the embedding of the high-dimensional data items on a two-dimensional grid for 12 easy clustering result retrieval and visualization. Inspired by the self-organized behavior of bird flocks, we represent each 13 document object with a flock boid. The simple local rules followed by each flock boid result in the entire document flock 14 generating complex global behaviors, which eventually result in a clustering of the documents. We evaluate the effici...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2006
• Where: JSA
• Authors: Xiaohui Cui, Jinzhu Gao, Thomas E. Potok
• Keywords: Algorithm, Document, Flock, JSA 2006