A Survey of Evolutionary Multi-Objective Clustering Approaches

This article presents how the studies of the evolutionary multi-objective clustering have been evolving over the years, based on a mapping of the indexed articles in the ACM, IEEE, and Scopus. We present the most relevant approaches considering the high impact journals and conferences to provide an overview of this study field. We analyzed the algorithms based on the features and components presented in the proposed general architecture of the evolutionary multi-objective clustering. These algorithms were grouped considering common clustering strategies and applications. Furthermore, issues regarding the difficulty in defining appropriate clustering criteria applied to evolutionary multi-objective clustering and the importance of the evolutionary process evaluation to have a clear view of the optimization efficiency are discussed. It is essential to observe these aspects besides specific clustering properties when designing new approaches or selecting/using the existing ones. Finally, we present other potential subjects of future research, in which this article can contribute to newcomers or busy researchers who want to have a wide vision of the field.