Differential evolution and non-separability
Andrew M. Sutton, Monte Lunacek, L. Darrell Whitley · 2007
Recent results show that the Differential Evolution algorithm has significant difficulty on functions that are not linearly separable. On such functions, the algorithm must rely primarily on its differential mutation procedure which, unlike its recombination strategy, is rotationally invariant. We conjecture that this mutation strategy lacks sufficient selective pressure when appointing parent and donor vectors to have satisfactory exploitative power on non-separable functions. We find that imposing pressure in the form of rank-based differential mutation results in a significant improvement of exploitation on rotated benchmarks.