Differential evolution with linear bias reduction in parameter adaptation

Abstract

In this study, a new parameter control scheme is proposed for the differential evolution algorithm. The developed linear bias reduction scheme controls the Lehmer mean parameter value depending on the optimization stage, allowing the algorithm to improve the exploration properties at the beginning of the search and speed up the exploitation at the end of the search. As a basic algorithm, the L-SHADE approach is considered, as well as its modifications, namely the jSO and DISH algorithms. The experiments are performed on the CEC 2017 and 2020 bound-constrained benchmark problems, and the performed statistical comparison of the results demonstrates that the linear bias reduction allows significant improvement of the differential evolution performance for various types of optimization problems.