A novel mutation strategy selection mechanism for differential evolution based on local fitness landscape

The performance of differential evolution (DE) algorithm highly depends on the selection of mutation strategy. However, there are six commonly used mutation strategies in DE. Therefore, it is a challenging task to choose an appropriate mutation strategy for a specific optimization problem. For a better tackle this problem, in this paper, a novel DE algorithm based on local fitness landscape called LFLDE is proposed, in which the local fitness landscape information of the problem is investigated to guide the selection of the mutation strategy for each given problem at each generation. In addition, a novel control parameter adaptive mechanism is used to improve the proposed algorithm. In the experiments, a total of 29 test functions originated from CEC2017 single-objective test function suite which are utilized to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm. The Wilcoxon rank-sum test and Friedman rank test results reveal that the performance of the proposed algorithm is better than the other five representative DE algorithms.

Automated summary

The paper introduces a novel DE algorithm called LFLDE based on local fitness landscape for guiding mutation strategy selection. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms five representative DE algorithms in terms of performance.