Ensemble strategies in Compact Differential Evolution

Abstract

Differential Evolution is a population based stochastic algorithm with less number of parameters to tune. However, the performance of DE is sensitive to the mutation and crossover strategies and their associated parameters. To obtain optimal performance, DE requires time consuming trial and error parameter tuning. To overcome the computationally expensive parameter tuning different adaptive/self-adaptive techniques have been proposed. Recently the idea of ensemble strategies in DE has been proposed and favorably compared with some of the state-of-the-art self-adaptive techniques. Compact Differential Evolution (cDE) is modified version of DE algorithm which can be effectively used to solve real world problems where sufficient computational resources are not available. cDE can be implemented on devices such as micro controllers or Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) which have limited memory. In this paper we introduced the idea of ensemble into cDE to improve its performance. The proposed algorithm is tested on the 30D version of 14 benchmark problems of Conference on Evolutionary Computation (CEC) 2005. The employment of ensemble strategies for the cDE algorithms appears to be beneficial and leads, for some problems, to competitive results with respect to the-state-of-the-art DE based algorithms © 2011 IEEE.