A velocity-based butterfly optimization algorithm for high-dimensional optimization and feature selection

Abstract

Throughout the last decade, high-dimensional function optimization problems have received substantial research interest in the field of intelligence computation. Butterfly optimization algorithm is a new meta-heuristic technique that has been proven to be more competitive than other optimization methods on low- dimensional problems. The basic butterfly optimization algorithm and its variants are not used to solve high-dimensional problems. Therefore, this paper develops an improved version of butterfly optimization algorithm to deal with the high- dimensional optimization problems. Inspired by particle swarm optimization, a modified position updated equation is designed by introducing velocity item and memory item in the local search phase to guide the search for candidate individuals. Moreover, a novel refraction-based learning strategy is introduced into butterfly optimization algorithm to effectively enhance diversity and exploration. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is tested on 40 benchmark problems with 100, 1000, 10,000 dimensions. The statistical results show that our algorithm has better performance than the basic butterfly optimization algorithm, its variants, and other population-based approaches to deal with the high-dimensional optimization problems. Finally, the high-dimensional feature selection and fault identification of wind turbine problems are solved and the comparisons show that the proposed algorithm outperforms better than most methods in terms of classification accuracy and number of the optimal feature subset.