The effect of swapping vectors during mutation in differential evolution

Abstract

This paper considers the effect of swapping vectors during mutation, which are used for mutant vector construction. In the classic/ canonical differential evolution three mutually different vector are picked from the population, where one represents the base vector, and the difference of the remaining two represents the difference vector. Motivated by the fact that there is no selection pressure in selecting the base vector, the effect of setting the best one of the selected three as the base vector is investigated. This way, a corresponding selection pressure is achieved and the exploration of the search space is directed more towards better solutions. Additionally, the order of the vectors used for generating the difference vector is considered as well. The experimental analysis conducted on a fair number of standard benchmark functions of different dimensionalities and properties indicates that the aforementioned approach performs competitively or better compared to the canonical differential evolution.