Developing a hybrid data mining approach based on multi-objective particle swarm optimization for solving a traveling salesman problem

Abstract

A traveling salesman problem (TSP) is an NP-hard optimization problem. So it is necessary to use intelligent and heuristic methods to solve such a hard problem in a less computational time. This paper proposes a novel hybrid approach, which is a data mining (DM) based on multi-objective particle swarm optimization (MOPSO), called intelligent MOPSO (IMOPSO). The first step of the proposed IMOPSO is to find efficient solutions by applying the MOPSO approach. Then, the GRI (Generalized Rule Induction) algorithm, which is a powerful association rule mining, is used for extracting rules from efficient solutions of the MOPSO approach. Afterwards, the extracted rules are applied to improve solutions of the MOPSO for large-sized problems. Our proposed approach (IMOPSP) conforms to a standard data mining framework is called CRISP-DM and is performed on five standard problems with bi-objectives. The associated results of this approach are compared with the results obtained by the MOPSO approach. The results show the superiority of the proposed IMOPSO to obtain more and better solutions in comparison to the MOPSO approach.

Keyword : traveling salesman problem, data mining, multi-objective PSO, association rule mining, CRISP-DM algorithm, GRI algorithm