Recombinator-k-means: An evolutionary algorithm that exploits k-means++ for recombination. (arXiv:1905.00531v5 [cs.LG] UPDATED)

We introduce an evolutionary algorithm called recombinator-$k$-means for
optimizing the highly non-convex kmeans problem. Its defining feature is that
its crossover step involves all the members of the current generation,
stochastically recombining them with a repurposed variant of the $k$-means++
seeding algorithm. The recombination also uses a reweighting mechanism that
realizes a progressively sharper stochastic selection policy and ensures that
the population eventually coalesces into a single solution. We compare this
scheme with state-of-the-art alternative, a more standard genetic algorithm …

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