Abstract
This paper introduces an alternative fuzzy clustering method that does not require fixing the number of clusters a priori and produce reliable clustering results. This newly proposed method empowers the existing Improved Artificial Fish Swarm algorithm (IAFSA) by the simulated annealing (SA) algorithm. The hybrid approach can prevent IAFSA from unexpected vibration and accelerate convergence rate in the late stage of evolution. Computer simulations are performed to compare this new method with well-known fuzzy clustering algorithms using several synthetic and real-life datasets. Our experimental results show that our newly proposed approach outperforms some other well-known existing fuzzy clustering algorithms in terms of both accuracy and robustness.