Finding Playing Styles of Badminton Players Using Firefly Algorithm Based Clustering Algorithms

Cluster analysis can be defined as applying clustering algorithms with the goal of finding hidden patterns or groupings in a dataset. Different clustering methods provide different solutions for the same dataset. Traditional clustering algorithms are popular, but handling big data sets is beyond the ability of such methods. We propose three big data clustering methods, based on the Firefly Algorithm (FA). Three different fitness functions were defined on FA using inter cluster distance, intra cluster distance, silhouette value and Calinski-Harabasz Index. The algorithms find the most appropriate cluster centers for a given data set. The algorithms were tested with four popular synthetic data sets and later applied on two badminton data sets to identify different playing styles of players based on physical characteristics. The results specify that the firefly algorithm could generate better clustering results with high accuracy. The algorithms cluster the players to find the most suitable playing strategy for a given player where expert knowledge is needed in labeling the clusters. Comparisons with a PSO based clustering algorithm (APSO) and traditional algorithms point out that the proposed firefly variants work similarly as the APSO method and surpass the performance of traditional algorithms.