Electrical Search Algorithm: A New Metaheuristic Algorithm for Clustering Problem.

In this study, we proposed a new metaheuristic algorithm called Electrical Search Algorithm (ESA). The proposed algorithm is based on the movement of electricity in high-resistive areas such as wood, glass, and gases. ESA has a unique initialization scheme that only one agent initializes at the lower and upper bounds of the search space, which creates structures called poles. After that, ESA uses unique exploration and exploitation strategies to search. The search mechanism is based on electrons moving to opposite poles. ESA differs from other metaheuristics compared to its initialization scheme, pole search mechanism, and update strategy of the best solutions. ESA was tested with the "100-Digit Challenge" benchmark functions in the IEEE-CEC-2019, four well-known benchmark functions, and an np-hard clustering problem. For the clustering problem, we used four well-known datasets: Iris, Wine, Seeds, and Hepatitis C Virus. ESA was compared with seven different metaheuristic algorithms on these well-known benchmark functions, and the results of the clustering problem were compared with the K-Means algorithm. Additionally, Friedman Signed Rank and post hoc Wilcoxon Test were run to show the significance of the results. In all of the well-known benchmark functions, ESA either offered the best results or similar results to other compared algorithms. The score of the ESA on the IEEE-CEC-2019 benchmark functions shows us that even with the minor evaluation numbers, ESA can achieve similar results to the competing algorithms. Results show that ESA has a robust mechanism for not trapping in local points and moves slow but persistent rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]