Binomial Distribution Assisted Individual Selection for Differential Evolution
Jia-Wei Ji, Qiang Yang, Xudong Gao, Peilan Xu, Zhenyu Lu · 2023
Mutation plays a crucial role in assisting differential evolution (DE) to effectively solve optimization problems. The key to mutation lies in the selection of parent individuals participating in the mutation. Along this road, this paper devises a binomial distribution-assisted individual selection strategy for DE. Specifically, this paper takes advantage of the probability distribution function of the binomial distribution to assign weights to individuals based on their fitness rankings. In this way, the selection of individuals focuses more on medium better individuals instead of the top best ones. Therefore, high mutation diversity can be preserved and thus it is likely that falling into local regions can be effectively avoided. Embedding this selection strategy into DE, a novel DE variant called binomial distribution assisted DE (BDDE) is developed. Experiments conducted on the CEC2017 benchmark suite have verified the effectiveness of BDDE in solving optimization problems. Particularly, BDDE gains much better performance against the well-known and representative mutation strategies.