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In this article, the effectiveness of variable string length genetic algorithm along with a recently developed fuzzy cluster validity index (PBMF) has been demonstrated for clustering a data set into an unknown number of clusters. The flexibility of a variable string length Genetic Algorithm (VGA) is utilized in conjunction with the fuzzy indices to determine the number of clusters present in a data set as well as a good fuzzy partition of the data for that number of clusters. A comparative study has been performed for different validity indices, namely, PBMF, XB, PE and PC. The results of the fuzzy VGA algorithm are compared with those obtained by the well known FCM algorithm which is applicable only when the number of clusters is fixed a priori. Moreover, another genetic clustering scheme, that also requires fixing the value of the number of clusters, is implemented. The effectiveness of the PBMF index as the optimization …