Probabilistic Harmony Search

Abstract

Harmony Search (HS) is a new meta-heuristic algorithm imitating the music improvisation process where musicians search for a better state of harmony. In this paper, a new improvisation scheme is proposed that explicitly uses a probabilistic model of candidate solutions stored in the harmony memory. Pitch adjustment uses a probability distribution to mutate a decision variable while random selection has been replaced by generating samples from the probability distribution. The proposed scheme favors diversification in the early stages and intensification during the final stages of the search process. The performance of the proposed method is investigated and compared with a state-of-the-art HS variant and other recent methods when applied to 18 benchmark functions. The experiments conducted show that the proposed method generally outperforms the other methods when applied to the benchmark problems.