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Data clustering is one of the most common and challenging problems in the machine learning domain. It requires an efficient method to be addressed. This paper proposed a new version of the Flow Direction Algorithm (FDA) to solve various optimization problems. The proposed method is called FDAOA, which enhanced the performance of the original Flow Direction Algorithm by the arithmetic operators that have been used in the Arithmetic Optimization Algorithm (AOA). The main aim of the proposed FDAOA is to avoid the recognized weaknesses in the original methods; stuck in the local area, premature convergence, and weak equilibrium between the exploration and exploitation search mechanisms. The proposed method is tested on two sets of various problems to validate its performance. In the first set, twenty-three benchmark functions are used, which belong to three categories; seven unimodal functions, six multimodal functions, and ten fixed dimension functions. In the second set, eight common data clustering problems are used to prove the ability of the proposed FDAOA to deal with real-world optimization problems. The results of the proposed method are compared with other well-established methods, and the proposed FDAOA achieved promising output compared to the other methods on various tested problems. The proposed method got the optimal clustering solutions almost in all the tested data clustering problems with clear significant improvements against the other comparative methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]