PaDE: An enhanced Differential Evolution algorithm with novel control parameter adaptation schemes for numerical optimization

Abstract

Differential Evolution (DE) variants have been proven to be excellent algorithms in tackling real-parameter single objective numerical optimization because they have secured the front ranks of these competitions for many years. Nevertheless, there are still some weaknesses, e.g. (1) improper control parameter adaptation schemes; and (2) defect in a given mutation strategy., existing in some state-of-the-art DE variants, which may result in slow convergence and worse optimization performance. Therefore, in this paper, a novel Parameter adaptive DE (PaDE) is proposed to tackle the above mentioned weaknesses and the PaDE algorithm has three advantages: (1) A grouping strategy with novel adaptation scheme for Cr is proposed to tackle the improper adaptation schemes of Cr in some state-of-the-art DE variants; (2) A novel parabolic population size reduction scheme is proposed to tackle the weakness in linear population size reduction scheme; (3) An enhanced time stamp based mutation strategy is proposed to tackle the weakness in a former mutation strategy. The novel PaDE algorithm is verified under 58 benchmarks from two Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC) Competition test suites on real-parameter single objective numerical optimization, and experiment results show that the proposed PaDE algorithm is competitive with the other state-of-the-art DE variants.