Clustering using flower pollination algorithm and Calinski-Harabasz index

Task of clustering, that is data division into homogeneous groups represents one of the elementary problems of contemporary data mining. Cluster analysis can be approached through variety of methods based on statistical inference or heuristic techniques. Recently algorithms employing novel meta-heuristics are of special interest — as they can effectively tackle the problem under consideration which is known to be NP-hard. The paper studies the application of nature-inspired Flower Pollination Algorithm for clustering with internal measure of Calinski-Harabasz index being used as optimization criterion. Along with algorithm's description its performance is being evaluated over a set of benchmark instances and compared with the one of well-known K-means procedure. It is concluded that the application of introduced technique brings very promising outcomes. The discussion of obtained results is followed by areas of possible improvements and plans for further research.