Possibilistic Fuzzy c-means (PFCM) algorithm is a powerful clustering algorithm. It is a combination of two algorithms Fuzzy c-means (FCM) and Possibilistic c-means (PCM). PFCM algorithm deals with the weaknesses of FCM in handling noise sensitivity and the weaknesses of PCM in the case of coincidence clusters. However, PFCM still has a common weakness of clustering algorithms that is easy to fall into local optimization. Cuckoo search (CS) is a novel evolutionary algorithm, which has been tested on some optimization problems and proved to be stable and high-efficiency. In this study, we propose a hybrid method encompassing PFCM and improved Cuckoo search to form the proposed PFCM-ICS. The proposed method has been evaluated on 4 data sets issued from the UCI Machine Learning Repository and compared with recent clustering algorithms such as FCM, PFCM, PFCM based on particle swarm optimization (PSO), PFCM based on CS. Experimental results show that the proposed method gives better clustering quality and higher accuracy than other algorithms.