Differential evolution with two-level parameter adaptation.

The performance of differential evolution (DE) largely depends on its mutation strategy and control parameters. In this paper, we propose an adaptive DE (ADE) algorithm with a new mutation strategy DE/lbest/1 and a two-level adaptive parameter control scheme. The DE/lbest/1 strategy is a variant of the greedy DE/best/1 strategy. However, the population is mutated under the guide of multiple locally best individuals in DE/lbest/1 instead of one globally best individual in DE/best/1. This strategy is beneficial to the balance between fast convergence and population diversity. The two-level adaptive parameter control scheme is implemented mainly in two steps. In the first step, the population-level parameters Fp and CRp for the whole population are adaptively controlled according to the optimization states, namely, the exploration state and the exploitation state in each generation. These optimization states are estimated by measuring the population distribution. Then, the individual-level parameters Fi and CRi for each individual are generated by adjusting the population-level parameters. The adjustment is based on considering the individual's fitness value and its distance from the globally best individual. This way, the parameters can be adapted to not only the overall state of the population but also the characteristics of different individuals. The performance of the proposed ADE is evaluated on a suite of benchmark functions. Experimental results show that ADE generally outperforms four state-of-the-art DE variants on different kinds of optimization problems. The effects of ADE components, parameter properties of ADE, search behavior of ADE, and parameter sensitivity of ADE are also studied. Finally, we investigate the capability of ADE for solving three real-world optimization problems.

Optimal Selection of Parameters for Nonuniform Embedding of Chaotic Time Series Using Ant Colony Optimization.

The optimal selection of parameters for time-delay embedding is crucial to the analysis and the forecasting of chaotic time series. Although various parameter selection techniques have been developed for conventional uniform embedding methods, the study of parameter selection for nonuniform embedding is progressed at a slow pace. In nonuniform embedding, which enables different dimensions to have different time delays, the selection of time delays for different dimensions presents a difficult optimization problem with combinatorial explosion. To solve this problem efficiently, this paper proposes an ant colony optimization (ACO) approach. Taking advantage of the characteristic of incremental solution construction of the ACO, the proposed ACO for nonuniform embedding (ACO-NE) divides the solution construction procedure into two phases, i.e., selection of embedding dimension and selection of time delays. In this way, both the embedding dimension and the time delays can be optimized, along with the search process of the algorithm. To accelerate search speed, we extract useful information from the original time series to define heuristics to guide the search direction of ants. Three geometry- or model-based criteria are used to test the performance of the algorithm. The optimal embeddings found by the algorithm are also applied in time-series forecasting. Experimental results show that the ACO-NE is able to yield good embedding solutions from both the viewpoints of optimization performance and prediction accuracy.