Int. J. Computational Science and Engineering, Vol. x, No. x, 200x 1
Differential evolution with k-nearest-neighbour-based
mutation operator
Gang Liu* and Cong Wu
School of Computer Science,
Hubei University of Technology,
WuHan, 430072, China
Email: lg0061408@126.com
Email: oidipous@gmail.com
*Corresponding author
Abstract: Differential evolution (DE) is one of the most powerful global numerical optimisation
algorithms in the evolutionary algorithm family and it is popular for its simplicity and
effectiveness in solving numerous real-world optimisation problems in real-valued spaces. The
performance of DE depends on its mutation strategy. However, the traditional mutation operators
are difficult to balance the exploration and exploitation. To address these issues, in this paper, a
k-nearest-neighbour-based mutation operator is proposed for improving the search ability of DE.
The k-nearest-neighbour-based mutation operator is used to search in the areas which the vector
density distribution is sparse. This method enhances the exploitation of DE and accelerates the
convergence of the algorithm. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed mutation
operator on DE, this paper compares other state-of-the-art evolutionary algorithms with the
proposed algorithm. Experimental verifications are conducted on the CEC ‘05 competition and
two real-world problems. Experimental results indicate that our proposed mutation operator is
able to enhance the performance of DE and can perform significantly better than, or at least
comparable to, several state-of-the-art DE variants.
Keywords: differential evolution; unilateral sort; k-nearest-neighbour-based mutation; global
optimisation.
Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Liu, G. and Wu, C. (xxxx) ‘Differential
evolution with k-nearest-neighbour-based mutation operator’, Int. J. Computational Science and
Engineeringy, Vol. x, No. x, pp.xxx–xxx.
Biographical notes: Gang Liu received his PhD in Computer Software and Theory from
State Key Laboratory of Software Engineering, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China in 2012.
He is currently a Lecturer with the School of Computer Science, Hubei University of
Technology, WuHan, China. His current research interests include evolutionary computation,
image processing, and machine learning.
Cong Wu received his PhD in Information Engineering from the Graduate School of Engineering
at Hiroshima University, Hiroshima, Japan in 2012. He is currently an Associate Professor
with the School of Computer Science, Hubei University of Technology, WuHan, China. His
current research is mainly in the area of image processing include computer vision and machine
learning.
1 Introduction
Optimisation is an important research area in computer
science. Many real-world problems may be formulated as
optimisation problems with variables in continuous domains
(Alashti et al., 2015; Jia et al., 2016; Li et al., 2015;
Liang and Du, 2016). The purpose of optimisation is to
determine the solutions for all of the decision variables
by optimising the objective function. For optimisation
problems, it is difficult to find the global optimal solution
when the dimension is high and there are numerous
local optima. Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) (Back and
Schwefel, 1993) are optimisation techniques which are
inspired by the natural evolution of species and have
been successfully applied to solve optimisation problems.
EAs contain a wide range of algorithms that have been
introduced to solve complex optimisation problems, such
as the genetic algorithm (GA) (Goldberg, 1989), particle
swarm optimisation (PSO) (Kennedy and Eberhart, 1995),
differential evolution (DE) (Price et al., 2005), etc. Among
EAs, DE has shown significant success in solving different
numerical optimisation problems (Das and Suganthan,
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