A density clustering-based differential evolution algorithm for solving nonlinear equation systems

Abstract

Solving nonlinear equation systems (NESs) is one of the most important tasks in numerical computing. The NESs usually have multiple roots, and quickly locating their roots in a single algorithm run with a limited number of iterations has always been the algorithm improvement direction. In order to further enhance the efficiency of the existing methods, a density clustering-based differential evolution algorithm (DCDE) for the NESs problem solving is proposed in this paper. Firstly, density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN) is used to divide the population into clusters and noises, which provides a better direction for population evolution. Secondly, a cluster evaluation factor is proposed, which not only divides the clusters into excellent clusters and non-excellent clusters, but also prevents the migration of excellent clusters and maintain the diversity of populations. Then, a migration strategy and individual generation mechanism are proposed to guide non-excellent clusters to migrate to promising regions. Finally, combined with an archive technique, the individuals which satisfy the solution requirements are archived and randomly initialized to further improve population diversity. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, comparative experimental results of the propsoed DCDE with other state-of-the-art algorithms for thirty NESs problems solving show that the proposed DCDE is the most effective algorithm to locate more roots in a single run.