Improving particle swarm optimization based on neighborhood and historical memory for training multi-layer perceptron

Abstract

Many optimization problems can be found in scientific and engineering fields. It is a challenge for researchers to design efficient algorithms to solve these optimization problems. The Particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm, which is inspired by the social behavior of bird flocks, is a global stochastic method. However, a monotonic and static learning model, which is applied for all particles, limits the exploration ability of PSO. To overcome the shortcomings, we propose an improving particle swarm optimization algorithm based on neighborhood and historical memory (PSONHM). In the proposed algorithm, every particle takes into account the experience of its neighbors and its competitors when updating its position. The crossover operation is employed to enhance the diversity of the population. Furthermore, a historical memory Mw is used to generate new inertia weight with a parameter adaptation mechanism. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, experiments are conducted with CEC2014 test problems on 30 dimensions. Finally, two classification problems are employed to investigate the efficiencies of PSONHM in training Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP). The experimental results indicate that the proposed PSONHM can effectively solve the global optimization problems.